Thinking Ahead

[tonysmith1929]

Hi friends.... My PC has now been plodding on fairly well for over 4 years, and am thinking it may soonish come to a standstill. I have a 200gb drive, partitioned 180 to C drive and 20 to D. (As it came from HP) D is a recovery drive only. I also have the one permitted DVD copy of D as backup. What I need to know /do is hopefully copy the whole of C, including OS, to my external 360GB drive, currently holding just a few films,can be dumped.
Is it practical to send the D backup drive OR the same thing from DVD backup ,to the USB external, to get the OS on it, and then send the rest of program files to the external drive afterwards ????? This probably sounds daft to you experts, if there is a better way I would be glad to hear it. I DO NOT have an XP windows disc to reload from. Idiot proof ideas welcome !!!!!!! Thanks.....

[MilesAhead]

I would advise making some kind of image backup so that you don't have to reinstall all your apps. I would only lay on the factory restore stuff as a last resort if you don't have a valid image backup(or like if you found out all your backups had a virus or something.)

Here's a few recommendations for free imaging programs:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-drive-imaging-program.htm

[Chewy]

I do a lot of rescue work, and in the end there's no substitute for a clean install.

[MilesAhead]

I do a lot of rescue work, and in the end there's no substitute for a clean install.

I'm looking around now for more rescue and install tools. Do you have any recommendations for quick restore tools? I just tried to use Paragon backup just to make a CD with the partition table for the drive. Says first track and mbr cannot be saved to CD or DVD. I suspect it's not because it's technically difficult. Must be some tool that will boot and copy your MBR and partition table that you saved. Any kind of rescue tools, esp. free or inexpensive, would be helpful. Thanks.

[MilesAhead]

Hmmmm saved MBR and Partition Table to USB with Paragon. But would be nicer if I had a bootable disc that would lay the partition table and MBR on.

@Abuilder was it you that mentioned an all-in-one rescue CD of some kind? I'm searching but I forget the named of it.

[Abuilder]

Miles
I think you are talking about when I mentioned to DRF about cloning his cluttered up HD to a new drive using Western Digital’s Data Life Guard or Seagate’s Sea tools? Or something like that. In either case either the source or destination drive has to be Western or Seagate or the cloning software won’t run. The problem with cloning a buggy drive is that you are cloning all the bugs in the original.
IMO: You are better off backing up your important data to CD/DVD or a flash stick and doing a clean install of the OS.
What Chewy said.
BTW Miles, I have used Data Life guard to clone my desktop HD over to my/your external usb/sata drive and it was bootable after the clone.

[MilesAhead]

Thanks for the idea. Looks like the way to go. If it boots from the external then I should be able to lay back on at full speed. I may play around with vLite too once I know I can restore without an overnight operation. I was looking around on vLite site and I guess they have this other scripting engine wizard thing after the install where you can auto setup a bunch of your applications. Have your lean install with apps on one disc.

I probably would have left W7 on longer but it has the same problem where it won't serve my C88 Epson printer driver over the network. Prints locally fine but I don't want to drag & drop over the Lan every time I print a file.