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September 5th, 2011 08:00
Using Own System Image to Reinstall
Dimension E520 (2007) Vista Basic
I've just had to do a Factory reset as my system had got massively slow. I've spent lots of time get everything just right and it's running beautifully. I hadn't realised just how long this would take!!
To save time in future I thought I could create my own image of the C drive as it stands now. I know very little about doing this and have a couple of questions.
If I use my own system image to restore the C drive, will the existing Factory image on the D drive still be preserved and be able to be used again in future?
If restoring the C drive using my own system image goes wrong and say I can't get into Windows, is there any way to still access the Factory image.
Finally is there a simple (and hopefully free) software package to make such an image
Thanks for any advice with this
speedstep
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September 5th, 2011 10:00
If you get a 16 gig USB flash drive of good quality you can use the dell datasafe basic to make a restore boot flash.
This will allow you to restore the diag, restore, and system just as it came from dell on a new drive or the old drive as long as its the SAME SIZE OR LARGER. It will not restore to a smaller drive. Dell Datasafe cannot be cloned because its an encrypted ntfs partition. Therefore any modifications to the drive partition will permanently break the F8 restore unless you made the above listed backup onto a flash drive.
RoHe
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September 5th, 2011 11:00
Both Seagate and Western Digital offer free (limited) versions of imaging software for users who own one of their hard drives. So go to the right site and see what's available...
I use Seagate's free Disk Wizard (by Acronis). It has the option of creating an image that's just the C: partition or I can also include the Dell PC Restore partition and/or the Dell Diagnostics partition. So I can back up and restore everything on my hard drive. Seagate's limited version only allows full hard drive images, not incremental images, so that's a (minor) disadvantage. Be sure to save the image on an external hard drive or on DVDs.
But...my PC Restore paritition has XP SP2, and C:\ has XP SP3. So there'd be no point in going back to the Dell factory image because I'd have to reload SP3, unless the OS got so bogged down, it wasn't usable. Plus, the PC Restore partition doesn't include any of the software, personal files etc that I've loaded on this PC.
Ron