Backup info

[mbritton2]

I want to back up my PC so if something goes wrong I will restore my pc and was wondering will I still have to reinstall my os or will it put it all back the wat I had it and I want to know what is the best way to do it

[Ginsu543]

If you back up only your data, then you will have to reinstall the OS. The only way to make a backup that doesn't make you reinstall the OS is to buy a hdd imaging software like Norton Ghost or PowerQuest Drive Image. But I've also heard that you must do a repair install afterwards if you have WinXP. I know that with Win98SE, Drive Image allowed me to make perfect images of my entire hdd. If something went wrong, all I had to do was reinstall the image and I had everything exactly the way I had it before.

[therealwesty]

Anytime that I've cloned a back-up of my working OS onto a CD I have had to do a repair installation before Windows would boot. I am not sure if this is normal or whether I am messing something up when I make the image CD. I have PowerQuest to copy the entire partition to another harddrive and it has worked flawlessly when I copy it back onto my boot drive.

When I get time I want to make a Windows unattended install CD as discussed on another forum section here. (http://forum.pcstats.com/forumdisplay.php?f=34)