Backup your boot hard drive

Have you ever had that gut-wrenching feeling when you boot-up and are told your hard drive cannot be accessed? Whether you try running Repair Console or running emergency start floppies, nothing you do can get you in. To all intents and purposes, you have lost everything on your C: drive. Even if you had the forethought to backup your data to a second hard drive or some other media you will still have to reformat the disc and reinstall Windows, then all your programs. This can take days, assuming you can even find your original installation discs. I had this happen recently; (see Total Meltdown!!!) so I made sure it would never happen again. The answer is to create an image of your C: drive on another drive. My second drive was only 15 GB; nowhere near big enough for the job, so I had to buy a new drive. Having looked at the options I went for a Seagate 320 GB external drive at £79. My data and time are worth more than that, but cheaper, smaller options are available. As a rough guide, the drive needs to be half the size of the C: drive, but as the price of smaller drives is not much less than the Seagate, it is worth the extra for future-proofing: twenty years ago a 10MB disc seemed excessive!Easyrecovery

There are several programs around to create disc images and I am indebted to linderman (see link above) for his advice. In the end I opted to spend my money on the Seagate and go for the freeware program Drive Image, available from Runtime.
Note: DriveImage XML only runs under Windows XP Home, XP Professional and Windows Server 2003 only. The program will backup, image and restore drives formatted with FAT 12, 16, 32 and NTFS.

The first step is to run the downloaded program dixmlsetup.exe. This creates an icon on the desktop for dixml.exe. Running this program produces the following screen:

Select Backup and select the drive you want to back up.

Next, select the destination for your image, making sure it’s on a different drive. In this example I’ve used my Seagate external drive. The target partition must be greater or equal in size to the original source partition. For details of how to format a disc see How to format a Hard Drive partition in Windows XP

Open the browser folder to navigate to your destinaton.

When you have selected your destination press OK.
When Drive Image finishes, click on Finish and that’s it.

The next step is to make sure you can restore your image. There are several ways to do this but I used BARTPE available from nu2Recuva
You will also need the DriveImage_XML.cab file. This can be downloaded from the same site as the Drive Image file at Runtime. by clicking on the Create bootable CD-ROM link

First, unless you have an installation disc with SP2 included, you will need to create a slipstreamed disc. Instructions for doing this can be found here

Run the downloaded pebuilder3110a.zip file and save the extracted files in a folder of your choice. From that folder run the file pebuilder.exe.

In Source, enter the address for your installation files. This could be your installation disc if it contains SP2 or, as in the example shown above, the slipstreamed version.
In Custom include the Drive Image XML folder (this is optional) then click on Plugins