Windows XP bootable dvd-r with pre-installed programs...

[nissmo300]

Is this possible?

I want to make a Windows XP Sp1 bootable dvd-r and have it with some preinstalled apps. For example, when I reformat now I get a clean version of windows. Then I spend 1 hour installing updates and drivers and basic apps.

Can I make a bootable dvd-r where I can pop it in and reformat as I would a regular WinXP cd and re-install a clean windows and automatically install all the updates and a few programs. As much as I can fit on the dvd-r. Is this possible or am I asking to much?

[Craig Tucker]

What you can do is make a drive image of your OS drive using an application such as norton ghost.

[devinemi83]

Yeah I to would use ghost. Its quick and easy.

[nissmo300]

I have a few questions. I found a way to do it the way I mentioned but there is some scripting involved. I have a question about Norton Ghost.

1. I reformat my computer.
2. I install latest updates, patches, drivers.
3. I install Norton AntiVirus and Winzip.
4. I make an image of my HD so far with Ghost.

After 2 months my computer becomes cluttered again.

1. Do I have to reformat and then apply ghost image to return to above state?

or

2. Can I insert the ghost image I have on CDR or DVDR and return the above state?

[tompika]

2. Can I insert the ghost image I have on CDR or DVDR and return the above state?

I believe so...

[Craig Tucker]

You just need to restore the ghost image.

[nissmo300]

Sweet thats much easier. By the way do any of you know how much space the ghost image will aprox be with the above setup?

[Craig Tucker]

Depends on how much you have installed on your hard drive. Norton ghost does compress the image and my drive which has approx 12GB on it gets compressed down to about 5GB. Norton Ghost will split the image so it can be spanned over multiple discs.

[nissmo300]

I'm trying to fit it to 1 dvd-r. I pretty sure the operating sys, 2-3 apps and updates/drivers isnt 12 GB.

Thanks so much for your help guys.

[housepig]

check out Acronis TrueImage as well - very easy, very good and more user friendly than Ghost (at least the last version of Ghost I used...)

[devinemi83]

Ghost compresses pretty well, its all in what you want to compress. Things like jpeg,mp3.videos wont compress much if at all. But I made my restore disc using ghost 2001 and the disk being cloned was 1.1GB and it made a ghost image of only 660MB to put it on only one cdr. There is 3 levels of compression I believe. None, Medium and a High setting(those arent the exact names but rather the measure roughly). I set high and it turned 1100MB to 660MB. Thats pretty good.


As a measure of size, xp will compress most likely to between 900MB to 1.2GB since its around 1.5 itself alone. Norton will compress to maybe 50MB and winzip is almost not worth measuring since it will be less than 5MB most likely at full compression. Ghost is VERY easy to use. It will make a bootable restore cd/dvd so if windows cant even boot you pop it in and it will launch ghost and you tell it which image on the dvd to close(there would only be 1 usually) and which hard disk to aim at. It just asks are you sure and you click yes and it blasts the image back onto your drive. No reinstalling. Just clone and boot and you are set.


I bought it for 69.99. Its a REALLY useful item. Well worth the money you pay the first time it saves you HOURS of reinstalling and headaches.

[nissmo300]

Thanks a lot. That really helps. I have to reformat at least once a month or 2. My computer becomes cluettered becuase of a younger sister downloading whatever she sees online. Then I have to re-install all the same old updates, hotfixes, programs. This will deffently make my life easier.

By the way, how long does to reformat using a ghost image. Is it the same time as a ordinary reformat or much faster. It takes me about 40 min to reformat and than 1-2 hours to get everything installed and running again.

[mickle]

I use Drive Image 2002, it does all of above and it allows you to restore individual files from an image.

Mike

[devinemi83]

It runs as fast as it can copy the files off the dvd. I should add, with ghost you get a program called "gdisk" its the suped up version of fdisk, it makes formatting, partitioning easier than fdisk and its faster. Formatting itself doesnt take long, I did it to my 40Gb disk when I screwed a windows update up and it iced windows. I click to format it all and it took about 1 min. And to restore the image it took about 15mins. This was for a FULL win 98se install with ie6 with SP1, visual studio 6, about 50 programs, all windows security patches, and was 1100MB in size. 15 mins for 1100MB. So no matter how big the windows install WAY under an hour to restore it all in all.

This is ideal for a person like you, someone who has to do reinstalls ALL the time and wants to get right back to work instead of 6 hours of installing and trouble shooting. Its also a cool thing if you move PCs. I used it alot when I was beginning programming, I screwed this machine up alot and ghost was there for me

As I said in my previous post, some get turned off at the 65-75 price but when it saves you the first time, it becomes not only worth it but your new best friend.

[devinemi83]

I use Drive Image 2002, it does all of above and it allows you to restore individual files from an image.

Mike

You can restore single files with ghost as well. You run "Ghost Explorer" in windows and can copy files out of the image onto your disk. Although that wouldnt work on windows files since they cant be replaced while in use.

[energy80s]

Yes, I also use Ghost for fixing drive problems too. However, getting back to the original question, is it possible to setup a full Windows Live DVD (just like the Linux Live ones) that could run from DVD Bootup on any machine?

[devinemi83]

You mean run windows XP off of a DVD disc? Then no I really dont think so.

[housepig]

Acronis Trueimage allows you to access / restore individual files from an image, as well as reimaging your hard drive.

has a 1-10 slider for compression.

last time I restored, 2.0Gb of data, compressed to 1.3Gb of image file, restored in about 7 minutes from a dvdr.

[stiltman]

I use Drive Image 2002, it does all of above and it allows you to restore individual files from an image.

Mike

Plus it has:
Linux support ext2 file system (ghosts jacks up the boot system)
Advanced scripting (a lot more advanced than ghost switches)

[nissmo300]

Here is something I found that might be useful to some of you...

Have you ever wanted a Windows XP CD that would install Windows XP by automatically putting in your name, product key, timezone and regional settings? Followed by silently installing all your favourite applications along with DirectX 9.0b, .Net Framework 1.1 and then all the Pre-SP2 hotfixes, updated drivers, registry tweaks, and a readily patched UXTheme.dll without any user interaction whatsoever? Then this guide will show you how you can do just that!

Link: http://unattended.msfn.org/xp/index.htm

[deadpac]

You mean run windows XP off of a DVD disc? Then no I really dont think so. -devinemi83

Kind of sort of, you can have a windows xp pre-installation (actually a BartPE) type environment.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Not a complete windows xp bootable from CD but a good tool for sys admins and enthusiasts alike anyways.

I've seen an infamous bootdisk floating around that used PeBuilder and it had A LOT of useful tools contained on it.

Here is a small list of what was on that cd:

McAfee Antivirus, Symantec Ghost v8, PowerQuest Recovery Tools, Partition Magic 8, Opera7, Adobe Reader, TightVNC Viewer, IsoBuster, NeroBurningRom, WinRAR. Even some windows apps such as Calculator, Explorer, Paint, Command Prompt. All available from various shells that look and operate very much like a regular Windows Start bar. The default shell Nu2menu is pretty sweet; no more clunky dos gui's to mess with but a sweet win32 environment.

[energy80s]

Yes, its something like this I would be after. Although not necessarily with XP (I would prefer a more stable OS!!) Maybe 98SE or 2000sp3.

[nissmo300]

There is one called Hiren's BootCD 5.0. It features:

All in one Dos Bootable CD which has all these utilities

Partition Tools

Partition Magic 8.2
Best software to partition hard drive

Paragon Partition Manager 5.5
Universal tool for partitions

Partition Commander 8.01
The safe way to partition your hard drive, with undo feature

Ranish Partition Manager 2.44
a boot manager and hard disk partitioner.

The Partition Resizer v1.3.4
move and resize your partitions in one step and more.

Smart Fdisk 2.05
a simple harddisk partition manager

Active Kill Disk 1.1
Securely overwrites and destroys all data on physical drive.

Disk Clone Tools

Drive Image 2002
Best software to clone hard drive

Norton Ghost 8.0
Similar to Drive Image

Partition Saver 2.80
A tool to backup/restore partitions.

Antivirus Tools

F-Prot Antivirus 3.14b
Very good virus scanner (with ntfs support and easy to use for all)

Norton Antivirus 2004
For emergency when you cant boot to windows because of a virus

Recovery Tools

Offline NT/2K/XP Password Changer
utility to reset windows nt/2000/xp administrator/user password.

Active Partition Recovery 2.1
To Recover a Deleted partition.

Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro 6.3
To Recover data that has been deleted/virus attack

Winternals Disk Commander 1.1
more than just a standard deleted-file recovery utility

TestDisk 4.5.
Tool to check and undelete partition.

Testing Tools

DocMemory 2.0
RAM Test utility

GoldMemory 5.07
another RAM Test utility

System Speed Test 4.78
it tests CPU, harddrive, ect.

Hard Disk Tools

Hard Disk Diagnostic Utilities
Hard Disk Testing tools Supports Fujitsu, IBM/Hitachi, Maxtor, Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital, (easy to use with menu) + low level format

HDD Regenerator 1.31
to recover a bad hard drive

Ontrack Disk Manager 9.57
Disk Test/Format/Maintenance tool.

Norton Disk Doctor 2002
a tool to repair a damaged disk, or to diagnose your hard drive.

Norton Disk Editor 2002
a powerful disk editing, manual data recovery tool.

System Information Tools

Aida16 2.12
a system information tool, extracts details of all components of the PC

PCI and AGP info Tool
The PCI System information & Exploration tool.

Ontrack Data Advisor 5.0
Powerful diagnostic tool for assessing the condition of your computer

System Analyser version 5.2z
View extensive information about your hardware

Navrבtil Software System Information 0.57.4
High-end professional system information tool

Dos File Managers

Volkov Commander 4.99
Dos File Manager with LongFileName/ntfs support
(Similar to Norton Commander)

Dos Command Center 5.1
Classic dos-based file manager.

File Wizard 1.35
a file manager - colored files, drag and drop copy, move, delete etc.

File Maven 3.5
an advanced DOS file manager with high speed PC-to-PC file
transfers via serial or parallel cable

Other Tools

DosCDroast beta 2
Dos CD Burning Tools

Bootmagic 8.0
This tool is for multi boot operating systems

Picture Viewer 1.94
Picture viewer for dos, supports more then 40 filetypes.

QuickView Pro 2.51
movie viewer for dos, supports many format including divx.

LapLink 5.0
the smart way to transfer files and directories between PCs.

Dos Tools

NTFS Dos Pro 5.0
To access ntfs partitions from Dos

USB CD-Rom Driver 1
Standard usb_cd.sys driver for cd drive

Universal USB Driver 2
Panasonic v2.06 ASPI Manager for USB mass storage

Interlnk support at COM1
To access another computer from COM port

Interlnk support at LPT1
To access another computer from LPT port

and too many great dos tools
very good collection of dos utilities (with LongFileName tools)

extract, pkzip, pkunzip, pkzipfix, unrar, rar, ace, scandisk, scanreg,
attrib, deltree, xxcopy, diskcopy, filecopy, diskimage, edit, editbini,
fdisk, spfdisk, xfdisk,format, LowFormat(LF), find, sort, move, more,
hex, debug, regedit, split, label, mem, mhdd, xmsdsk, doskey,
duse, ddloader, bootpart, bootsave, bootrest, MBRwork, sys,
killcmos, cmos, cmospwc, cmospwd, bios,amipsw, aw, smartdrv,
guest, cpuid, intersvr, mscdex, mouse, lfndos, doslfn, ...

Windows Tools

SpaceMonger 1.4
keeping track of the free space on your computer

Drive Temperature 1.0
Hard Disk Drive temperature meter

Disk Speed 1.0
Hard Disk Drive Speed Testing Tool

MemTest 1.0
a Memory Testing Tool

PageDfrg 2.21
System file Defragmenter For NT/2k/XP

Split Join 1.3.3
a Small File Split-Join Tool

Ghost Image Explorer 7.0
to add/remove/extract files from Ghost image file

Drive Image Explorer 5.0
to add/remove/extract files from Drive image

And if you think 98 is a more stable OS than XP and you have a problem.

[Hummer-H2]

Decided to make it an official guide hoping that many more users would benefit from this, so i moved it to the guides section.

Win XP Clean Reinstall Everytime
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=200101