On Tuesday 02 May 2006 23.18, Teresa and Dale wrote: > Hi, > > OK, here's my deal. My girlfriend wants to use windoze, yes it has > already died from a bug and it took a while to get it all back to > working, again. This is what I want to do to make it easy when this > happens again, this is windoze so it will happen, likely sooner rather > than later too. > > I want to be able to back her drive up to a CD, the whole thing even if > it takes a few CDs. When it dies again, I want to be able to put in the > first CD and it boot and reinstall everything from there with little > interaction from me. > > Is there such a creature? Please tell me it is free. I'm used to Linux > remember. > > I can't believe I let her spend almost $200.00 on that crappie OS. < > hangs head in shame > She a great person in all other respects though. > I just have to keep working on this area. > > Thanks > > Dale
I've done that on Laptops (you know, those thingies that come with crap pre-installed) in order to put that back if I sell them later... I know if two ways that (might) work: a) dd - you might have to shrink the partition first or try 7zip to make it smaller later. You'll also need a pertition to store the file. I would do it from some live distro (Mepis or Knoppix or so). You can then put it back the other way round, but you may have to reinstall Windows first to gat a working mbr. b) Paragon Partition Manager. It is _not_ free unfortunately but it's good value for money. Get the CD iso image (the fools distribute it as an *.exe file!), burn it and boot. Amongst other things it will let you resize the partition (if required) and backup/archive it, if you want directly on CD or DVD. Note the software runs on a linux boot cd. As I said, it's not free ($50) - but you can get a free demo here: http://www.partition-manager.com/ and test it. Might save your ass some day. -- Stupidity is like a fractal; universal and infinitely repetitive. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
