How to Backup your boot hard drive
Have you ever had that gut-wrenching feeling when you boot-up and are told your hard drive cannot be accessed? Whether you try running Repair Console or running emergency start floppies, nothing you do can get you in. To all intents and purposes, you have lost everything on your C:\ drive. Even if you had the forethought to backup your data to a second hard drive or some other media you will still have to reformat the disc and reinstall Windows, then all your programs. This can take days, assuming you can even find your original installation discs. I had this happen recently, so I made sure it would never happen again. The answer is to create an image of your C:\ drive on another drive. My second drive was only 15 GB; nowhere near big enough for the job, so I had to buy a new drive. Having looked at the options I went for a Seagate 320 GB external drive at 79.00 USA My data and time are worth more than that, but cheaper, smaller options are available. As a rough guide, the drive needs to be half the size of the C:\ drive, but as the price of smaller drives is not much less than the Seagate, it is worth the extra for future-proofing: twenty years ago a 10MB disc seemed excessive!
There are several programs around to create disc images and I am indebted to linderman (see link above) for his advice. In the end I opted to spend my money on the Seagate and go for the freeware program Drive Image, available from
Runtime.
Note: DriveImage XML only runs under Windows XP Home, XP Professional and Windows Server 2003 only. The program will backup, image and restore drives formatted with FAT 12, 16, 32 and NTFS.
The first step is to run the downloaded program dixmlsetup.exe. This creates an icon on the desktop for dixml.exe. Running this program produces the following screen:
Select
Backup and select the drive you want to back up.
Press
Next
Next, select the destination for your image, making sure it’s on a different drive. In this example I’ve used my Seagate external drive. The target partition must be greater or equal in size to the original source partition.
Open the browser folder to navigate to your destinaton.
The next step is to make sure you can restore your image. There are several ways to do this but I used BARTPE available from
nu2
You will also need the DriveImage_XML.cab file. This can be downloaded from the same site as the Drive Image file at
Runtime. by clicking on the
Create bootable CD-ROM link
In
Source, enter the address for your installation files. This could be your installation disc if it contains SP2 or, as in the example shown above, the slipstreamed version.
In
Custom include the Drive Image XML folder (this is optional) then click on
Plugins
Select the entry for
DriveImage XML
Close this window then select
Burn to CD/DVD and select your burner in
Device.
Next, click on
Build and PE Builder will create a bootable CD.
If you ever need to use this disc, start your machine and edit your BIOS. For most systems this means pressing the
Delete button during startup. . When in BIOS, select
Advanced BIOS Features. Change the first startup device from floppy to CDROM. Click
F10 and press
enter. Your machine should then boot from the CD.
Note: If you are not using an Award BIOS, check your motherboard manual for the correct instructions for changing BIOS settings.
Where the normal
Start button appears in Windows you will now see
GO. If the reason you are having to restore is because of problems with your hard drive, you will first have to format the drive. To do that, select
Command Prompt (CMD)
At the command prompt type
format c: and follow the on-screen instructions, selecting
NTFS as the file system. Make sure that you create a primary partition and that this partition is set to active.
When the format is complete, click on
GO again and select
Programs then select
DriveImage XML
Select
Restore then click on
Next and navigate to where you saved your disc image.
Click
Next and your
C:\ drive will restored to it’s previous state.
Restart your machine, go back into
Edit BIOS, and change the boot order back to what it was. Your machine should now start up Windows with all your programs intact.
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