Frank said:
Wiping the hard drive is like hitting my system with a huge sledge hammer.
it does no damage.
The disavantage of formatting or deleting partitions. / wiping the
whole HDD. It is the time it takes to reinstall afterwards that is the
problem. .
You're planning on removing windows anyway though.
The other thing with formatting, is you have to back up your data
beforehand. You should have all your data in a least 1 directory, so
you can easily back it up.
I did some reading about autostreamer.exe... nice utility.
Do you concur that is the way to go?
Maybe for you. It's better to have a windows xp sp2 disc. than a
windows xp sp1 disc.
The way that'd be going is slipstreaming. It can be done without
autostreamer, but autostreamer might make it easier by doing some
things for you.
BTW, during all this chaos I sure found out that Norton's Ghost is not a
very good package. I think I am pretty good with computers but that
package (v9.0) sure needs some help. Nothing like faithfully doing
Ghost's and then find out they cannot be read.
Don't *rely* on NG. But it can be a lifesaver, saves a load of time.
I've uised it about 5 times and had 4 successes.
One time fixing somebodies computer I had a scare, restarted the
computer and got some strange error.. booted win xp pe and that
couldn't read anything. Then I took the computer back home, started it
and it was fine. restrated it many times and it was fine. So that was
a kind of success.
All the time I was safe even when it appeared to fail, because I
corretly calculated that however wrong Ghost can go. It cannot damage
anything on the partition that contains the image. Because Ghost cannot
write to that partition. There's always the scare choosing the
partition, sometimes all you have to identify them are te sizes!! One
mistake there is a bit scary. But you know that - I think - that
partition with the image file on it is safe. You persumably cannot
select it or it won't let you wite the image to it.. I copied all the
data to there. So it had data+image file.
Most, if not all, seem to prefer acronis trueimage.
The really frightening one is Partition Magic. That never went wrong
for me(except once when i was trying to experiment with settings that
couldn't work! But you always have the rescue disks which are like PM
for DOS. But, still, it can go wrong.. I always hold my breath and pace
around when resizing a partition. What if there is a power surge! What
if the HDD fails/hiccups during the process! Imagine how many
problems they must've run into testing this software! This is such a
complicated operation internally, like an aeroplane staying in the
air!!! And it's so necessary to do it.. If the user has one partition
and you need to create another to put the ghost image on.
