Take a look at image for windows by terabyteunlimited.com all their products are very accessible. they have image for windows, image for dos and image for linux. They are interchangeable with one another. you can image either files or the entire drive, or separate partitions if necessary. I have used them to image my system, and was able to image it onto another drive. I then swapped drives to make sure i could boot from the new drive. very good compression to. the price it right, I think I paid $50 for the entire suite, which also includes a boot manager and a set of utilities to do something like a sysprep. phil ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steve Matzura" <number6@speakeasy.net> To: "blind-sysadmin" <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 7:00 AM Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Accessible Disk Imagers
I'm the sys admin for a small network--my home network--which has, among other things, five desktops and two laptops running XP SP2. I recently had to rebuild one after something, and I still don't know what that something was, turned most of my machine into just so much cole slaw. It all started with trying to uninstall a trial version of a voice dialer called VoiceIt or something similar. Anyway, the uninstall went bad, and took the rest of the machine with it.
One New Year's resolution I'm deciding is a must-keep is to image all my boot drives in the house and pack 'em away against the day, which will hopefully never come, when I need them. I just took a Dell Dimension 4700 and rolled it back to factory defaults through use of the Dell System Recovery Environment (DSRE), which is a fancy shmancy name for nothing more than a hidden partition with a Ghost image and some batch file control on the front end to automate the process. I had just a wee bit of trouble with it in that somehow something (possibly even the deinstall of VoiceIt) had broken the master boot record for the hidden partition wherein the DSRE is located. Thanks to a gentleman on the net named Dan Goodell, I was able to put Humpty Dumpty together again and with about two minutes help from my self-proclaimed Ludite wife, brought the 4700 back to life. This is Something I wish not to have to repeat. Ever.
What was great about the DSRE was that it worked flawlessly. What was horrible about it was, of course, that it had no speech. So now that the computer's been completely updated and all the software I want on it has been reinstalled and everything's at a nice stable state, it's now time to do the deed and make another image, this one hopefully bootable from a CD and maybe even with some speech and accessible. Mind you, I'm going to have to do this, whatever it is, at least six times, so I'd like whatever I build to be accessible everywhere. I was even thinking really big like get a USB drive and put all the images on it and have a bootable front-end where I select which image I want to restore, and it just goes and does it. What are folks thoughts on how to do this?
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