Backing up and restoring my 'whole' system

[Guest]

I'm new at this so bear with me . . . I've been reading alot of the backup
discussions and just want to make sure I'm proceeding on the right path. The
following (starting and ending with underbars is just a bit of the history .
.. . not really neccesary reading so jump ahead if you want to get to my
question
__________________here's what's happened to me in the last month. I got an
error on my laptop when I booted up saying my config.sys was corrupt or
missing . . .eeeekk. Sounded serious ! so I'm basically stuck seeing as I
don't have a bootable CD (no floppy drive on my laptop) and borrow a laptop
and go through about 4 hrs of trying to make a bootable CD. I managed to get
to DOS but ended up getting frustrated trying to get going. I ended up
'restoring' from my System back up disks but, of course, 'lost' my data. I
took it in to a data recovery place which cost a couple of hundred and then 2
weeks later I got another error about ha.hll missing AAARRRGGHHH and got
shut down again. So . . . I took it in and got XP reloaded (without losing
data) and it only cost $100. I went out and bought an external hard drive (80
gigs, USB) and want to be able to back up and restore without any problems
__________________________

my questions to you guys is . . . I don't want to ask a dealer 'cause
they'll promise the moon . . . if I purchase Norton Ghost or Acronis True
Image
if I backup my whole system, OS, data & all, to the external drive and if my
system fails again, is it just a matter of 'restoring' using my System Back
up disks and then restoring my whole system from the extenal drive over top
and everything will be back to 'normal'??

 

[justme]

That's exactly what those applications are made for. I use ghost 2003, boot
from floppy or cd and create an image to the external usb drive. If my XP
drive should fail I can just install a replacement and restore the image and
would be back in the same exact state as I was when I created the image.

 

[Larry(LJL269)]

It will be normal as of when u made the image. U save every
bit in a partition.

I do exactly what u want to do - use Image 4 Windows (no
gotchas!) & USB2 drive which are great- $30+$70. Google this
Newsgroup 4 'ultimate backup' - my post gives overall eval.

U need a way to delete partitions- I use PMagic7

HTH-Larry

I'm new at this so bear with me . . . I've been reading alot of the backup
discussions and just want to make sure I'm proceeding on the right path. The
following (starting and ending with underbars is just a bit of the history .
. . not really neccesary reading so jump ahead if you want to get to my
question
__________________here's what's happened to me in the last month. I got an
error on my laptop when I booted up saying my config.sys was corrupt or
missing . . .eeeekk. Sounded serious ! so I'm basically stuck seeing as I
don't have a bootable CD (no floppy drive on my laptop) and borrow a laptop
and go through about 4 hrs of trying to make a bootable CD. I managed to get
to DOS but ended up getting frustrated trying to get going. I ended up
'restoring' from my System back up disks but, of course, 'lost' my data. I
took it in to a data recovery place which cost a couple of hundred and then 2
weeks later I got another error about ha.hll missing AAARRRGGHHH and got
shut down again. So . . . I took it in and got XP reloaded (without losing
data) and it only cost $100. I went out and bought an external hard drive (80
gigs, USB) and want to be able to back up and restore without any problems
__________________________

my questions to you guys is . . . I don't want to ask a dealer 'cause
they'll promise the moon . . . if I purchase Norton Ghost or Acronis True
Image
if I backup my whole system, OS, data & all, to the external drive and if my
system fails again, is it just a matter of 'restoring' using my System Back
up disks and then restoring my whole system from the extenal drive over top
and everything will be back to 'normal'??

Any advise given is my attempt to show appreciation for all
the excellent help I've received here but I'm no MVP so it
may only apply NUGS (Normally, Usually, Generally, Sometimes

 

[Kerry Brown]

I'm new at this so bear with me . . . I've been reading alot of the
backup discussions and just want to make sure I'm proceeding on the
right path. The following (starting and ending with underbars is
just a bit of the history . . . not really neccesary reading so jump
ahead if you want to get to my question
__________________here's what's happened to me in the last month. I
got an error on my laptop when I booted up saying my config.sys was
corrupt or missing . . .eeeekk. Sounded serious ! so I'm basically
stuck seeing as I don't have a bootable CD (no floppy drive on my
laptop) and borrow a laptop and go through about 4 hrs of trying to
make a bootable CD. I managed to get to DOS but ended up getting
frustrated trying to get going. I ended up 'restoring' from my
System back up disks but, of course, 'lost' my data. I took it in to
a data recovery place which cost a couple of hundred and then 2 weeks
later I got another error about ha.hll missing AAARRRGGHHH and got
shut down again. So . . . I took it in and got XP reloaded (without
losing data) and it only cost $100. I went out and bought an external
hard drive (80 gigs, USB) and want to be able to back up and restore
without any problems __________________________

my questions to you guys is . . . I don't want to ask a dealer 'cause
they'll promise the moon . . . if I purchase Norton Ghost or Acronis
True Image
if I backup my whole system, OS, data & all, to the external drive
and if my system fails again, is it just a matter of 'restoring'
using my System Back up disks and then restoring my whole system from
the extenal drive over top and everything will be back to 'normal'??

Yes that is the basic idea. Create an image of your drive then restore it if
something goes wrong. You will be back to the point where the image was
created. Both Ghost and TI will work. They will create a CD from which you
can boot and restore the image from the external drive. You don't need to
use the "System Backup Disks" that came with the laptop. Note: you will need
a CDRW drive attached to the laptop to make the restore CD.

The more important question is why are you having these problems. Did either
of the places you took the computer do any hardware testing. The erors you
are getting suggest there may be a hardware problem. It could be a failing
hard drive, bad ram or possibly other causes.