GS> By doing this I can have everything up in running from scratch in less GS> than an hour. My only problem is that I will be upgrading to WinXP GS> shortly. I have worked on NT systems at work, but never used at home, so GS> I am not sure this strategy will work when the new system arrives.
It sounds like you have a very similar strategy to me about backing up. Using a 2nd hard disk with Ghost (from http://www.symantec.com) is an ideal way of grabbing everything. I use command line parameters to drive Ghost which means I can auto-reboot the PC once it is complete, rather than sitting having to watch the paint dry. One thing you need to be aware of with XP is that you have to use Ghost 2002. Earlier versions won't touch the partitions, or at least when I tried it with Ghost 2001 they wouldn't - Microsoft appear to have munged the hard disk format to confuse things. Ghost 2002 is a PITA because you start having to enter your serial number when you restore images. That is because the Ghost license is supposed to be for a single PC only. Which is why I use Ghost 2001 for all my systems, and Ghost 2002 just for the one XP system. There are other (much cheaper) alternatives to Ghost. You might try Drive Backup from http://www.paragon-gmbh.com/n_frame.htm - those guys have some other very useful utilities which I highly recommend. Andrew http://www.kazmax.com ________________________________________________ Current version is 1.61 | "Using TBUDL" information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
