Hard Drive Image

[edtost]

My school is pushing Win XP SP2 on us in a couple of weeks, and I'm worried about breaking any programs/drivers/etc, since I have no way of reinstalling a bunch of them. Is there any easy way to make an image of my hard drive before the upgrade, so that if anything breaks, I can go off the network and reimage? I have an external HD with enough space to store a copy of my entire C drive.

[smoore]

norton ghost is one.

SP2 is wholesome goodness, strongly consider dealing with whatever PITA it brings.

[CORed]

I've upgraded two computers (home and work) from SP1 to SP2 without problems. YMMV, so making a backup is, as always, a good idea.

[edtost]

[ QUOTE ]
norton ghost is one.

[/ QUOTE ]

i'd also like to avoid paying for anything ... would there be a problem with just like booting off a knoppix cd and going scp c:\*.* F:\backup\*.* (or whatever the syntax for that is)?

[smoore]

Won't work. You'll have a bunch of files but wouldn't be able to reconstitute a working OS from it.

[CORed]

If you want to use Linux, you need to use dd to copy at the device level (entire drive or partition). If you do partitions, the partition you are copying the image to should be the same size as the one you are copying. It can be bigger, but you won't be able to access the extra space, unless you resize the file system.

[mosta]

I like xxclone. it does cost like 30 bucks. but it makes a bootable image, not something you have to extract and use a system disk for. bootable images/ clones are not supposed to work with xp, but this guy got it going. I love it. if my drive fails, my boot sequence automatically rolls over to the clone. I can just throw first one in the trash without breaking stride. no extraction or restoration.