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How do i make an image of my computer so that i may restore it at a later date?

  • Hello. I wish to make my computer into a dual boot machine. It currently has Windows 7 Starter on it. I want to set it up so that I can boot either Ubuntu or Windows from the hard disk. I have read extensively on how to do this and understand partitioning etc. However I have heard horror stories of people doing this and their entire Windows OS and files being deleted and I can't take this risk. I've heard you can essentially make an image of your hard drive (with OS and files) so that if all goes wrong and the hard drive deletes these things you can restore it to the state it was when you made the image. So my question is two part: (1) How do I make this image of the entire Hard Drive. (2) How could I restore the computer from this image if needs be. I would be keeping the image on my 500GB external drive.

  • Answer:

    it's easy, I use Macrium Reflect Free Edition. Install the program on Windows, create an image of whatever partition you want or the entire hard drive. You select where to save the image to (a separate partition or drive). You also will create a bootable cd which is what you use to restore images. Images can also be mounted as virtual drives so you can open files that are in them and copy files out of the image. For a free program Macrium is fantastic. My only tip is to do a disk cleanup and defrag before creating an image, this will help reduce the size of the image. For an idea of image size, the image of my 12gb Vista is about 5gb. Imaging does not really reduce the size of files that are already basically compressed like videos and pics. And this is important with the free edition of Macrium, you can only restore the image to a partition that is the same size or larger than what was imaged. (I shrink partitions before imaging to avoid worrying about this and it also helps reduce the size of the image) http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

Kevin Mccabe at Yahoo! Answers Visit the source

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Macrium Reflect gets it. Please don't mess with Ubuntu. Beautiful as the system is, it's just not right yet. It keeps crashin. Better store your stuff on Mozy. I love screwin around with my machine too, but have walked highways of hell.

Go to Start > Control Panel > Back Up and Restore Then in the left side of the window select "Create a system image". It will ask you where you want to save the backup. Select "On a hard disk" then select your external hard drive. Click "Next" then click start backup. Depending on how much it is backing up, it could take a while. Then when it's done you will have a system image. If you need to restore it, you will need your windows installation disc. If you don't have one, you can create one after the backup completes. It should ask you if you want to create a recovery disc, but you don't need one if you have your Windows 7 installation disc.

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