A Disk Imaging Question

[ArtShapiro]

The wife has had an X61 for the better part of this year, and it has been a nice little machine for her. Unfortunately, it came with Vista Home Basic. Now perhaps I don't need to say this, but neglecting my own somewhat-negative experiences with Vista, I can assert that Home Basic is a real black sheep among versions. It isn't particularly network-friendly, especially in domain environments, and seems considerably crippled. Right now, it hasn't been able to see network shares on my other six XP Pro machines for a few days. At least they can all see the X61, so I can always pull stuff even if I can't push it.

Well, enough babbling. I want to put XP Pro on this machine and restore sanity to my network environment.

The only sticky wicket is that the Vista installation has some monetary value, so I'd like to preserve it in the off chance I want to go back, or if I want to use it for the basis of upgrading down the line to a better version of Vista, probably Business.

My external USB optical unit can't write DVDs - only CDs - so I've never been able to make the "one allowed" set of recovery disks - obviously the easiest solution to my problem.

I've got networking capacity to spare, between other machines and a NAS drive. I have various USB external drives. I have the external CD writer.

What would the easiest / most cost effective means be of creating some sort of disk image or other form of preservation that could restore the Vista Home Basic setup if I decided to do that some day in a fit of insanity?

Art

[Harryc]

Why can't you use CD's?

[ArtShapiro]

Why can't you use CD's?

Gee Harry, it's been over a minute - what took so long?!

This may be my own lack of knowledge so start laughing: Given 25 or 30 gigs of stuff on the machine, wouldn't that be a boatload of CDs?

Art

[Harryc]

A create recovery media operation would take no more than 7 CD's. It does not backup or clone your drive. It just creates the media to load a factory Vista install. If you want to backup or clone the entire drive then use a product like Acronis True Image and backup to an external hard drive, or somewhere on your existing internal drive if you prefer.

[ArtShapiro]

Aha - much obliged!

Seven CDs I can handle. And normal backup procedures will easily handle the user data.

Appreciate the input.

Art

[ArtShapiro]

Aha - much obliged!

Seven CDs I can handle.

Art

Well, if anyone cares, guess I can't handle it. I burned the first recovery disk routinely, and then three separate attempts to burn the next disk failed about the same percentage through the disk. I gave up.

Decided to upgrade to Ultimate as an experiment even though I really thought XP would be more user-friendly. I wanted to see what something with a decent "Experience Rating" or whatever they call it would do. This guy turns out to rate a 3.5 because of the video; the other categories range from 4.8 to 5.0.

It wouldn't let me upgrade because the existing Home Basic installation was at a higher level (presumably due to the service pack) than the Ultimate disk I happened to have. So I simply did a full replacement install, and have spent about half the last day getting several hundred Lenovo & Microsoft updates installed, and a bunch of programs - the usual hassle.

But I think we're set now - I'm sitting in the tub and typing this on the machine, and nothing particularly nasty has happened yet with respect to Windows or any other programming.

But it sure would have been nice to burn the blasted disks.

Art

[Harryc]

Not sure where to tell you to start Art. I just burned a 7 CD set of Vista Business on my X61s yesterday using an external Lenovo USB 2.0 CDRW/DVD combo drive. It went flawlessly. I'd suspect the external drive or the media.

[goofyGAguy]

I'm sitting in the tub and typing this on the machine

I hope you're running on battery power.

[ArtShapiro]

I hope you're running on battery power.

Nah...actually have three of the machines on this board spanning the tub - the X61 and the oldest two T20 and T23 for updating.

With a ground fault interrupter outlet, my odds of any problems are YOW OUCH SIZZLE ...

[NautTboy]

I like Image4windows myself. Very easy and windows base. After a fresh install and software added, it took me 5 CD's .Software such as XP, office, nero, antivirus, and etc.