David said:
It seems that backing up the entire system with the XP backup utility
requires a floppy drive. Well, my laptop, like many, doesn't have a
floppy drive. Is there a way of backing up the entire system and boot
from a CD to initiate the complete recovery (assuming the BIOS is set
to boot that way)?
TIA,
David
If you're talking about using Ntbackup and the ASR wizard, no there is not
way to do it without a floppy drive. There are better backup solutions
though. Ntbackup cannot backup to DVD and will only backup to CD if other
3rd party CD burning software is available and even with that it will not
span CDs, i.e. one CD is the limit, which is not very practical.
One option is to use an imaging program. This makes an exact image of the
partition which can be saved on CD/DVD or to another drive - internal or
external. Imaging to an external USB 2.0 / Firewire drive works well. Then
occasionally burning an image to DVD gives you redundancy. Restores can be
done of the entire partition or individual files / folders. These work well
and make it easy to recover from a drive crash. Examples of this are:
Norton Ghost
Acronis True Image
Terabyte Unlimited's Image for Windows
CasperXP
Another option is a traditional backup program such as Stompsoft's PC
BackUP, Sonic's Backup MyPC or SecondCopy from
www.centered.com. There are
other backup programs out there as well. This can do a complete backup or
backup individual files and folders to DVD/CD and other drives.
