creating restore cd/disk for win200pro

[duffyr83]

i have a laptop with windows 2000 pro, however i do not have the restore disk to this laptop, i was wondering what my best option would be of the two below

1. use the windows backup utility. (would this save the Win OS, all files and programs so that if i made a restoration it would restore all back to its previous state?)

2. make the expense to purchase norton ghost or similar program (would i be able to save it to a usb drive then take that image i created and copy it to cd from another computer? and does it save the winOS and programs currently on the harddrive?)

what i'm look for is to create my own system restore cd or disk. any help is greatly appreciated and thank you all in advance for your suggestions or comments

thanks

[nissmo300]

Ghost makes a bootable image of your drive on cd-r or dvd-r. When your computer messes up just pop the cd or dvd. It will boot up like a windows cd and it will install your saved image. Very nice program.

[duffyr83]

i dont have cd burner on the laptop so would i be able to save it on to the harddrive and then transfer it using my home network to another computer with a cd burner and then take it from there?

thanks

[nissmo300]

You will need to save it on another partition than the one you're backing up.

[duffyr83]

thanks so far

one question though, my laptop only has one parition, c:drive, could i save the ghost image to anohter hardddrive over a network or could i just use the cd burner of anohter computer over a network? in other words, could i run norton ghost from my laptop and when asked to create the bootable image cd use the cd burner from my other computer over my network through my router?

hope that makes sense, thanks again for the help

alright

[duffyr83]

OR

is it possible to create a backup recovery disk of a harddrive from another computer over a network, router.

i mean install norton ghost on comp A. comp A is connected in a network sharing with comp B, from comp A you can see the entire hdd from comp B. with comp A, using norton ghost create a bootable recovery cd of the harddrive from comp B, then use that recovery cd to restore comp B, does that make sense?

thanks for any help

alright

[HillJack]

is it possible to create a backup recovery disk of a harddrive from another computer over a network, router.

Yup! I do this on a regular basis with my laptop.

One of my desktop machines has the DVD burner, so I run Ghost 2003 on it AND the laptop, connect the two together with TCP/IP over my Linksys switch and create an image of my laptop drive on the desktop drive. Since Ghost does its thing in PC-DOS, you need to configure your network settings ahead of time.

Once that's done, I reboot the desktop and burn the Ghost image + *.exe from the Norton Ghost 2003 directory, to a bootable DVD using NERO.

If I ever have a problem, or want to restore the image, I boot off that DVD, run ghost.exe and walk away. 30mins later (8.4GB of compressed data), the image is restored.

Works like a charm

[duffyr83]

thanks, i'm going to buy norton ghost now and back up my laptop

thanks everybody for your replies

alright