"Q" using xp backup?

[Guest]

The question being, after using the XP pro backup wizard has backed up my
whole C: drive to a different drive (and having made the floppy) as told to
do by the wizard, my question:

If everything goes whacky and it will not boot to anything usefull or to
even safe-mode, can I use the new boot floppy from the backup wizard to boot
my computer and get to the backed up file image to restore everything to
normal???

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

The question being, after using the XP pro backup wizard has backed up my
whole C: drive to a different drive (and having made the floppy) as told to
do by the wizard, my question:

If everything goes whacky and it will not boot to anything usefull or to
even safe-mode, can I use the new boot floppy from the backup wizard to boot
my computer and get to the backed up file image to restore everything to
normal???

I have never used this facility and I therefore can't answer your
question with any degree of confidence. However, this is irrelevant.
If you want a robust, reliable backup then you ***must test it
yourself*** on a spare disk. If you rely on someone else's word,
what will you do if it fails when the crunch comes? If you don't have
a spare disk, ask your friendly computer dealer for a 10 GByte
disk. It will probably cost next to nothing.

Instead of using the inbuilt backup facility, consider using an imaging
product such as Acronis TrueImage. Version 7 is now freely
downloadable and it lets you burn a boot CD. But again: Test it
instead of relying on what other people say!
http://www.acronis.com/mag/DVhbcjdI

 

[Rock]

The question being, after using the XP pro backup wizard has backed up my
whole C: drive to a different drive (and having made the floppy) as told
to
do by the wizard, my question:

If everything goes whacky and it will not boot to anything usefull or to
even safe-mode, can I use the new boot floppy from the backup wizard to
boot
my computer and get to the backed up file image to restore everything to
normal???

No, that's not how it works. First you have to insert the XP CD and boot
from it. At some point during the text mode portion of setup a prompt comes
on to press F2 for ASR and then it prompts to insert the floppy disk. It
will then install minimal copy of XP, will then restore drives and
partitions and system from the the ASR backup file.

Note: not all the data on the system may be backed up. It depends on how
you have the system set up, so you need to make sure all data is
independently backed up.

I don't recollect where in that process it asks for the floppy to be
inserted, but you don't boot from it. If you look at the contents of the
floppy it's is just two data files, not a bootable floppy. The media on
which the backup is stored has to be accessible to the system when it comes
time to install from the backup.

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...cc90-4b52-b6ab-064f9db8d2721033.mspx?mfr=true

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/c14621675.mspx

The ASR recovery process is lengthy, there are many places along the way
where things can go wrong (for example floppy disks are notoriously
unreliable, without warning it just might not be readable, and even when
everything worked fine for the few times I tested it, the restored system
did not come back to the same working condition. Some programs didn't work.

There are other, much better means for saving the state of the system and
restoring it. Whatever method you decide on, you have to test it under real
working circumstances, not just asking questions about it or reading how it
works, you have to do it to see how it works and that it does what you need
when you need to do it.

An alternate approach is to use a drive imaging program such as Acronis True
Image Home, version 10 or Norton Ghost to create a compressed image of the
drive which can be saved on external media.