Page 1 of xp laptop harddrive back up

Hi All,

haveing just legally reinstalled windows xp home with out the original disc on a friends laptop,

Is there an easy free way to burn one or two dvds for recovery, so that if the same happens again I just restore the hard drive contents from the 2 burned dvds.

Clonezilla looked likely, but is unclear what I am about to do

thanks
jemma

Clonezilla is great.

you burn a livecd, i.e. a CD that you boot into so ntohig is installed to OS. follow the onscreen prompts and you can image to a USB device or another hard drive etc.

it`s not as wizard friendly as Ghost or Acronis (the main alternatives but you have to pay for them), but as long as you read the prompts it`s straight forward.

the site has screen shots in a handy  guide.

if you google clonezilla backup xp

there even youtube videos

This item was edited on Thursday, 4th March 2010, 18:21

admars ,

I`ve just looked at the instructions, but to me it did not look like it was how to back up the hard drive, so that if a disaster happened I could use the 2 dvds to restore my hard drive

jemma

Save disk image

Description: Save 1st disk (hda) as an image on 2nd disk (hdb) (Step by step)


Create Recovery Clonezilla

Description: Create a autorun recovery Clonezilla live CD or USB flash drive (Step by step)

the process of backing up a hard drive, is making an image.
In short, the entire contnents of a hard drive are backed up into a fiel called the image file. Imagine it`s a bit like using winzip to make a big zip of the hard drive.

Using a  program like clonezilla outside of windows is good `cos it means you knwo no windows files are in use. I don`t know if you could make the image to a dvd directly. I think it would b ebest (this is how I do it) make the image to another hard drive, then burn that to DVD and keep on external hard drive.

when you restore you use your clonezilla disc, and that can read from the image. If you only have 1 dvd drive that may be a problem but it looks liek clonezilla can load to memory so that it can eject the disc to insert your backup disc.

Admars,

many thanks, I shall try that properly later in the week.
As it happens I have an external dvd drive that writes

jemma