How to make an ASR backup

S

Scott-az

Hi, I have an HP laptop w/out a floppy drive and recently installed XP
service pack 3. How do I create an ASR (Automated System Recovery) backup
and boot CD?

Thanks
 
J

John John (MVP)

Is this XP Pro or XP Home? You cannot use ASR backups to restore XP
Home Edition, it works with the Professional version only. Also, while
you can make the ASR backup without a floppy diskette, (the Asr.sif and
Asrpnp.sif files can be extracted from the ASR backup set), you cannot
do a restore without a floppy diskette, the Asr.sif and Asrpnp.sif files
*must* be supplied on a floppy diskette, the ASR program will not accept
them from any other media source. You could use one of the USB floppy
drives that is recognized by the Setup/ASR program, otherwise you will
have to use another bare metal restore strategy.

John
 
S

Scott-az

John John, Thanks for the prompt reply. This is XP Pro. By "bare metal
restore strategy", do you mean an external hard drive. I have an external
hard drive. Can I simply do a full backup of everything and use that as the
restore? I read somewhere that you could do an ASR backup and copy the
ASR.SIF and ARSPNP.SIF files to a CD. Would this not work as the restore CD
along with the backed up files? Again, Thanks for such a prompt reply!
 
J

John John (MVP)

ASR is a "bare metal" restore process, it completely wipes the drive
with a format before it does the restoration, this is called bare metal
restore, as in the computer is barren of any data, it is in a "bare
metal" state. A different bare metal restore solution could be to use a
disk imaging (cloning) utility and create an image of the hard drive and
save it to an external drive or burn it to a DVD.

The .sif files required for the ASR process *must* be supplied on a
floppy diskette, they will not be accepted from any other media source.

Bare Metal Restoration
http://www.backupassist.com/education/bareMetalASR.html

John
 
S

Scott-az

John,
So, if I do a full backup of everything, including system files, on my
laptop to an external hard drive, is that enough? Can I restore my laptop,
if it crashes, from the external backup?

Thanks
 

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