Any way to create an image of your comptuer to restore from?

Kyzen

I find myself reformatting my work laptop every 3-6 months, and am getting pretty sick of the driver hunting, and then spending 2 days reinstalling various development tools.

Anybody know of a tool to create an exact image of my drive, even down to the registered & activated copy of windows, that would allow me to easily install it and be able to start using it without having to hunt down and install dozens of drivers and software packages?

redimpulse

We use Norton Ghost to do just that here at work.

DrFrylock

Norton Ghost is a classic tool for this, but I've found that Acronis TrueImage is far more usable and just as good. Getting ghost drivers set up to image a drive onto USB or a network is a real bear sometimes.

Feral

Will TrueImage make a bootable DVD that can reimage a drive straight from the disc?
I've been trying to do this in Ghost and getting it to work reliably has been a colossal pain in the ass.

HalberdBlue

Damn, I didn't know something like this existed. I'll need to keep it in mind for next time I reformat, since I do it every 6 months or so too.

DrFrylock

According to the Acronis website, the TrueImage home product supports backup to:

New! FTP
Hard disk drives
Networked storage devices
CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW
ZIP®, Jaz® and other removable media
P-ATA (IDE), S-ATA, SCSI, IEEE1394 (Firewire) and USB 1.0 /2.0 drives, PC card storage devices

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/features-storage-media.html

Although with DVDs holding only 4-8GB, it might be worthwhile just to buy a cheapo external hard drive to use as the image source and then image off that.

One of the other pages indicates you might be able to do a bare-metal restore, but I'm not 100% sure. They have a fully functional free trial, download it and have a go.

katzchenfisch

is there something like this for mac?

Im looking to reformat my computer, and something like that would be very useful!

Starfuck

Ive seen MAC folks mention SuperDuper before. Seems to look really good, and the basic version is free.

Pheezer

HalberdBlue wrote: »

Damn, I didn't know something like this existed. I'll need to keep it in mind for next time I reformat, since I do it every 6 months or so too.

What's the point of re-formatting if you're just going to restore the drive to the exact state it was in prior to formatting once you're done

Phoenix-D

pheezer FD wrote: »

HalberdBlue wrote: »

Damn, I didn't know something like this existed. I'll need to keep it in mind for next time I reformat, since I do it every 6 months or so too.

What's the point of re-formatting if you're just going to restore the drive to the exact state it was in prior to formatting once you're done

You do the image right AFTER the format, so instead of format, reinstall windows, get updates, install critical programs you format, image restore.

Pheezer

Phoenix-D wrote: »

pheezer FD wrote: »

HalberdBlue wrote: »

Damn, I didn't know something like this existed. I'll need to keep it in mind for next time I reformat, since I do it every 6 months or so too.

What's the point of re-formatting if you're just going to restore the drive to the exact state it was in prior to formatting once you're done

You do the image right AFTER the format, so instead of format, reinstall windows, get updates, install critical programs you format, image restore.

That makes more sense, but you still need to get the inevitably more recent driver updates and patch all of your software to the newer versions.

DrFrylock

Yeah, but that's infinitely faster than installing everything. You also install all your apps and image those. You don't just install windows, you install windows, photoshop, illustrator, office, all 40 little utilities you use, winamp, etc. Installing a few patches takes about as long as installing one of those programs.