Omega Owners Forum

Chat Area => General Discussion Area => Topic started by: Brikhead on 18 August 2010, 15:54:32

Title: P.C. advice.
Post by: Brikhead on 18 August 2010, 15:54:32

I'm after a bit of advice and thought I would ask the knowledgeable folk in Oof'er land for their help.

I've just purchased an external hard drive because the 250 gig one in my computer was nearing it's capacity. My anti virus was also out of date and I needed to install a different one to Norton that was previously in use.
I decided to format my computers harddrive and start with a fresh install, after nearly two days it is now fully updated and ready to use.

Now on to my question, how do I go about saving a version of my 'computer' onto the external harddrive so that if I need to format again in the future I could have a fresh, updated version of Vista ready to go?
I assume it's not just a case of copying and pasting onto the hard drive?

Thanks in advance...

Title: Re: P.C. advice.
Post by: wakeyomega on 18 August 2010, 16:10:05

Hi
There are many disc image solutions out there. For myself, I use Acronis True Image, which will do standard regular file / disc backups and can also do a full physical disk image.

I'm sure many other OOOf'ers will add their own preferred solution shortly

Good Luck

Pat

Title: Re: P.C. advice.
Post by: Kevin Wood on 18 August 2010, 16:18:03

Quote

I'm sure many other OOOf'ers will add their own preferred solution shortly

.. Such as booting into Linux and using ntfsclone. :y

Kevin

Title: Re: P.C. advice.
Post by: Brikhead on 18 August 2010, 16:47:05

...goes to Google "disc image solutions"... :y

Title: Re: P.C. advice.
Post by: Brikhead on 18 August 2010, 16:49:59

This looks to be what I'm after...

"Disk cloning is the process of copying the contents of one computer hard disk to another disk or to an "image" file. Often, the contents of the first disk are written to an image file as an intermediate step, and the second disk is loaded with the contents of the image. This procedure is also useful when moving to a larger capacity disk or to restore to a virgin installation."

Taken from here...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning

Title: Re: P.C. advice.
Post by: dbug on 18 August 2010, 17:52:10

Number of options for cloning - I personally use Acronis True Image - but you can use Norton Ghost among others - even use ntfsclone from a linux boot disk as Kevin suggests.

One of the better freebie ones is EASEUS Disk Copy - get it here - http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/ or DriveImage XML - get it here - http://www.runtime.org/

HTH