Of crashes and restores...

[X-Calibur]

Well my finely tuned (or so I thought) Win2k Pro machine went toe up, Unable to find Boot device yesterday... repari console did no good. emergency repair disk no go either... install/repair went up to the n5inf.cat file missing ( know bug by MS where somehow the CDrom get's unaccessible during this procedure -- tried swapping around different CD roms... no go....) so reapir crash..

So it's reinstall time...

lucky for me, the way my disk is set, I have C: win2k only files D: Program files only and E: data stuff and the rest.... so reinstallling stuff is a breeze since you install and copy over the program file then and all your settings are restored....

But a pain still !!!

Does any one have a suggested way of restoring an installation quicker then that? Like an disk image or so... and how do you do that, what software do you use?

Thnaks a million

X

[phil]

I use the method you have just described. I have multiple partitions - C:Win2K, D:Programs, E:SWAP and F:data.

I keep all of my drivers, patches and updates on my server and also all programs are stored there (so I don't have to go and find what websites certain programs come from). All I have to do then is install to C: and then connect to my server to get all the drivers and patches etc.

I suppose it would be easy to set up my Win2K Server machine to have a Win2K Pro image with every patch and program loaded for each of my machines. The I could do a remote install accross the network....but I am too lazy to work that out :rolleyes:

[MikeTimbers]

$small gets you an additional hard disk which you format with FAT32. You buy(gasp!) Ghost2001 and make a boot disk from the installed software.

Boot off the floppy and image your entire system partition once a week to the FAT32 disk. If the OS goes titsup, boot from the floppy and restore the OS partition, registry and all.

I do this and it's saved me several times.

[X-Calibur]

Now that is what I wanted to hear !!!

I have Ghost lying around somewhere... I think it came bundled with something.. can't remember thought....

But why a second disk? I case of disk failure? My Quantum never failed... the 486 still runs a Quantum (130 megs.... LOL) flawlessly...I love those Quantum (shame they were bought off by Maxtor....

Thanks

Can the image be put on the network and accessed from there? Does ghost boot disk allows that?

Cheers !!!

[MechCD]

i think ghost does support networks if the proper drivers are running. i know you can in windows (dos box) but you prolly need dos drivers for pure dos :D

[zhotfire]

X, i've been using Power Quest's Drive Image for years(started with ver2.0). It runs in DOS and can create images of local or network drives(providing you've loaded your nic driver). It's alot like ghost in many ways. I usually just save an image of my boot drive to another partition, then burn it to cd. Very handy! :)

[zhotfire]

Also, if i get paranoid about transfer->burning errors, i'll run a md5 checksum of the original image and the image burned... just to make sure they're identical before i delete the original. Having backups is so cool.... :cool:

[fizler]

why not just run a raid setup and have a full backup of everything? You also gain 2x the speed from results i've seen from various tests and what not.

[dezekiel]

Did you ever run into a problem with Ghost when moving Win2000 from an old drive to a new drive? The one I can't solve is when you get caught in an endless loop when you try to log in to Win2000 after ghosting it to a new drive. Something to do with the boot sector I bet. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Dan

[Martyn]

Originally posted by fizler
why not just run a raid setup and have a full backup of everything? You also gain 2x the speed from results i've seen from various tests and what not.

To run a combo of RAID0 and RAID1 you need 4x HDD - all matching. So if you have a nice virtual and super fast 60Gb RAID0 array (2x 30Gb HDD's), you have to match those disks for your backup array - bit watesfull not to say expensive.