Image that
No. Not a typo.
I recently purchased a surplus laptop for $50. It has a few -more or less- cosmetic issues, but it seems to run well. It has a completely clean install of Microsoft Windows XP SP3. By clean, I mean that there is ONLY the operating system on its 80GB harddrive. This is an excellent base to restore from should the fecal matter hit the rotary oscillator.
I have created a disk image that is split into three 2GB parts. That makes it convenient for DVD archival storage. A DVD can store about 4.7GB so I can effectively store an 80GB (mostly empty) harddrive on one and a half DVDs.
I created this image using a Knoppix LiveCD and a utility called partimage. Knoppix is one of the major distributions of Linux and is well known as a perfect way to rescue a computer. A Linux LiveCD will load a full blown operating system from your CDROM and never mess with your harddrive. It is a great way to test drive Linux without having to mess with your existing system. The other great thing is that it is a prefect utility disk for when your Windows box inevitably dies. And at some point, it will.
Here's how I created the disk image -
1) Burn and boot to a LiveCD of Knoppix 6.4.4.
2) Connected an external USB hard drive.
3) Open the file manager and select the external drive to mount it.
4) Open a terminal window and type "sudo partimage".
5) highlight the drive you wish to image and press tab.
6) enter the full path of the location on your external drive you wish to store the image, and the name of the image you wish to create. Be sure to use the Unix file path format. Partimage does not understand spaces in the path name. Make sure that there are none.
7) Tab through the menu until you start the process.
That is pretty much it. Simple. And much easier to use than using dd over a network. The image was created in about 15 minutes.
I recently purchased a surplus laptop for $50. It has a few -more or less- cosmetic issues, but it seems to run well. It has a completely clean install of Microsoft Windows XP SP3. By clean, I mean that there is ONLY the operating system on its 80GB harddrive. This is an excellent base to restore from should the fecal matter hit the rotary oscillator.
I have created a disk image that is split into three 2GB parts. That makes it convenient for DVD archival storage. A DVD can store about 4.7GB so I can effectively store an 80GB (mostly empty) harddrive on one and a half DVDs.
I created this image using a Knoppix LiveCD and a utility called partimage. Knoppix is one of the major distributions of Linux and is well known as a perfect way to rescue a computer. A Linux LiveCD will load a full blown operating system from your CDROM and never mess with your harddrive. It is a great way to test drive Linux without having to mess with your existing system. The other great thing is that it is a prefect utility disk for when your Windows box inevitably dies. And at some point, it will.
Here's how I created the disk image -
1) Burn and boot to a LiveCD of Knoppix 6.4.4.
2) Connected an external USB hard drive.
3) Open the file manager and select the external drive to mount it.
4) Open a terminal window and type "sudo partimage".
5) highlight the drive you wish to image and press tab.
6) enter the full path of the location on your external drive you wish to store the image, and the name of the image you wish to create. Be sure to use the Unix file path format. Partimage does not understand spaces in the path name. Make sure that there are none.
7) Tab through the menu until you start the process.
That is pretty much it. Simple. And much easier to use than using dd over a network. The image was created in about 15 minutes.