Taking recovery image?

[Rulke]

Just done a fresh Vista install on a friends laptop, installed drivers and a bunch of software. Whats the best software to use to create a disk image I can restore to this point from if required?

 

[Kryten]

Acronis is my imaging package of choice, especially under Vista (as Ghost still doesn't work quite right with it). It's fairly light, has a nice bootable CD you can knock up for it to recover/image from there. Works over networks (even the home version!) so you can keep an image on a NAS box/remote PC if you wanted, as long as it's shared it will pull from it. Also quick and very easy.

Took an image with Acronis of my *full* vista installation, drivers & apps before moving over to windows 7 - and it handles a 450gb image file without issue Didn't take too long either.
And it's only between 30 and 40 quid depending on the offers around.

 

[Rulke]

Playing about with the trial - that's an impressive piece of software!

Thanks for the tip

 

[soze]

If you wanted to try more software check out Hiren and Pankaj's Homepage » www.hiren.info it has a few bits of software for this kind of thing all in 1 bootable cd.

 

[Kryten]

Hirens is a damned useful CD all round, i swear by it for day to day diagnosis etc. Left my copy in one of my schools this week so this is serving as a reminder to burn another copy