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Create Bootable Backup CDs |
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Wednesday, 02 January 2008 |
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How often does something go wrong and you mess up your system? Wouldn't it be nice if you had a backup CD like Dell and companies that provide their customers. A CD you could put in a your computer and restore it 100 % back to its original working order. Actually it's not that hard to do ...
What you need (click the links):
Making an Image
First you want to make an image. The best time to make an image is right after you do a fresh install or at the very least, when everything is running smoothly. To do this use Drive Image Pro.
Install drive image pro to another drive or partition other than the one you are backing up so it will be out of the way.
Start the program and it will tell you that your computer has to be restarted in DOS mode to continue. Remove any floppies or bootable CDs from their drives and click okay.
Once the program is up and running, click the box to create new image.
Choose the partition that you want to make an image out of and choose a path to save it to as well as a file name. The path can't be on the same partition that you are backing up.
Choose High Compression and then go to advanced and select "check for system errors". Also select "Split Image into Multiple Files", just remember to keep the image size small enough so you have enough space to copy drive image pro onto the CD as well. (Note: drive image pro 4.0 takes up about 40 MB of space, I think 3.0 takes about 25 MB). Then create the image.
Creating the CD
After you are done creating the image reboot back into windows and open up Easy Cd Creator.
Go to File->new CD Layout->Bootable CD
Insert a Windows 9x startup disk and continue.
If you don't have a startup disk you can create one by going to Control Panel -> Add/Remove programs and go to the startup disk tab. You will need either you Windows 9x CD or the cab files on a hard drive.
You should have 2 files on the root of your CD layout now. BOOTCAT.BIN and BOOTIMAGE.BIN.
Add your image file to the layout in the root as well. (Ex. WIN2K.PQI) Also add your drive image pro directory to the CD as well.
Now just click and when its finished burning you will have a self-booting CD and that is all you need incase your computer crashes.
Testing the CD
Restart your computer and check the bios to make sure that you bios is set to boot from CDs before hard drive or floppy disk.
If you completed all steps as above, your computer should boot just like it was booting from your windows startup disk. Just change the directory to your drive image pro dir and run pqdi.exe and choose restore partition.
It should take about 20 minutes to restore one CD full of data to a partition. |
