Backing up System Drivers

[andy]

Hi hope someone can help me. Im running Windows XP Professional version and
have installed new drivers for a scanner, camera, sound card and video card.
The problem occurs when I totally re-boot from Windows CD which I do approx
once every 6 months to clean system. I need to re-insert all drivers from
various diferent cd's which is very time consuming as you then have to
re-configure them with the system.
I would appreciate if anyone could advise me what is the best way to back up
your drivers for future so when I do re-boot I can install these drivers to
correct state without much hassle.
Many thanks for anyones help.
Andrew Holland

 

[Norm]

Andy, your easiest option given what you are doing is to buy something like
Ghost or Drive Image and after you do a clean install and have all the
drivers loaded make an image of it to a 2nd hard disk. You could then
install all your software make sure everything is the way you want it and
image again. Now getting back to square one can be done in a matter of
minutes.

 

[Lemon Jelly]

andy - typed:

Hi hope someone can help me. Im running Windows XP Professional
version and have installed new drivers for a scanner, camera, sound
card and video card. The problem occurs when I totally re-boot from
Windows CD which I do approx once every 6 months to clean system. I
need to re-insert all drivers from various diferent cd's which is
very time consuming as you then have to re-configure them with the
system.
I would appreciate if anyone could advise me what is the best way to
back up your drivers for future so when I do re-boot I can install
these drivers to correct state without much hassle.
Many thanks for anyones help.
Andrew Holland

You could take a snapshot of your entire system partition with disc
imaging s/w such as Drive Image, Ghost or True Image. You'll need a
separate partition to store the image, split parts to fit CDR or create
on DVD R.

I have several images including one never more than a week old, with
Office XP activated & a fresh install with WinXP activated. Drive Image
5 will compress down to ~66%. Disc imaging s/w is pretty reliable & will
image the OS partition without leaving Windows on the latest version of
DI. This method will compliment your 6 monthly fresh install. Drive
Image works fine from Task Scheduler which I run in the early hours with
Verify enabled as part of the process.

I can't think of doing it any other way. I don't know if the bundled
Files & Settings Transfer Wizard (FAST) will allow driver restoration &
suitable Restore Points can't be archived.

 

[Norm]

Paul, do you have DI7? I recently purchased it and got an error trying to
restore to a smaller disk. The smaller disk is 8 times larger than the
amount of data. Waiting for an answer to my email to Powerquest. Just
wondering if anyone has tried this, I can do the same thing with DI 2002 and
it works fine.

 

[Lemon Jelly]

Norm - typed:

Paul, do you have DI7? I recently purchased it and got an error
trying to restore to a smaller disk. The smaller disk is 8 times
larger than the amount of data. Waiting for an answer to my email to
Powerquest. Just wondering if anyone has tried this, I can do the
same thing with DI 2002 and it works fine.

I'm yet to try out DI7. I created many partitions of the same size for
this reason & have often wondered what would happen if a tried to
restore an image to a smaller location than the original minus its free
space, though I'm considering partition size, not disc size here -
please post back PQ's answer (if you get one). As my largest partitions
are only ~20GBs, transferring to smaller discs shouldn't be an issue.

Do you know if DI7 allows more than one partition to be restored in the
same session? DI5 will create multiple partitions but only restores one
at a time.