Hi all I’m about to go back to uni tomorrow. My dad has given me his old laptop a Toshiba R100 it’s a really nice small thing so ideal for travelling and taking to lectures.

I have just finished reinstalling windows and the drivers, windows took 30mins to install and the drivers took hours and were a real pain! So I was wondering can I make an image of my hard disk now for a reinstall instead of having to go through all this aggro again if my disk fails in the future?

I don’t have a DVD rewriter on the laptop as it is connected to my xbox 360 HD drive which I don’t think can write. I can pull the data off buy using my external hard drive and then burn a DVD on my main PC. So what sort of software would I need to do this?

PowerISO is great at that kind of thing. But you might have to buy the full version for what you want to do.

Ok i got the full version now what do i do lol

There are also freeware programs that do nicely:

Disk Image Backup
DriveImageXML which I recommend very highly. It is reliable, fast, and easy to use:
http://majorgeeks.com/DriveImage_XML_d4919.html
http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm
DIXML 1.21 DOES now support both Vista and XP


To backup just drivers:
(DoubleDriver...I haven't tried this one)
"With Double Driver you can view which drivers are installed in your system and you can backup the drivers you choose, save and print the drivers list, and more."
http://majorgeeks.com/Double_Driver_d4802.html
http://boozet.xepher.net/
http://boozet.xepher.net/dd/index.htm


edit to add-
BTW, there are several pretty decent tutorial videos made by actual users of DIXML, so they're geared to the user. Also, users have written several on-line guides...also pretty decent. However, it is an intuitive program and detailed instructions are only needed by people completely new to the concept of backing up a partition/hard-drive.

Well, with PowerISO it's pretty simple, you create a project (drag and drop) and convert to an .iso or .cue or .bin file or you simply burn it on to DVD. But if you mean serious backup I recommend Norton Ghost 10.0. But for anything else to do with ISO's and etc and other types of backup. Definitely PowerISO.

I think almeza multiset is better, u can make a backup for windows, drivers and installed softwares on dvd. whenever u face the problem with windows, just u get total new installation by autorun from the backup dvd.

mahesh reddy.b ----srisailam----andhrapradesh-----india

mahesh reddy.b said:

I STRONGLY disagree. Not only is multiset incredibly expensive (US$100), it is unduly complicated if all you want to do is create a disk backup.

DriveImageXML (ver 1.21 or higher) is freeware, very reliable, and extremely easy to use.


An alternative is freeware XXclone for the scenario where you have available an extra hard drive of the same or larger capacity as your system partition. With XXclone you can make a BOOTABLE backup of the system drive. Then, if your main drive fails all you have to do is replace the failed drive with the XXclone backup drive, re-boot, and you're on your way within about 5 minutes.