Adventures in Drive Imaging: Part 1 - Making the Image

Somehow I have gotten to this point without ever making an Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. Well, that all changed this morning when I made my first "UBCD4Win". The only customization I did was to update AVG Free Edition with the latest virus definitions. (making this CD obsolete tomorrow, rather than last month)

It looks like I could even have installed Kapersky if I wanted to spend the $$. Cool.

The idea behind UBCD4Win is the same as BartPE, to the extend that I don't know the difference, other than I installed UBCD4Win rather than BartPE, purely by chance.

What's this got to do with imaging? Well, I'd tell you, but I'm too busy getting off topic.

By restarting the computer with my UBCD4Win in the drive I was presented with a weird version of Windows XP that doesn't run off the Hard Drive, instead it runs from the CD and from memory. (So make sure you have enough RAM, or this could potentially be uncomfortably slow!)

I've got 1GB of RAM in this machine, and it worked just fine.

It has Drive Image XML and Self Image in the package, and while I've only used Drive Image XML, I was more curious about Self Image because it also grabs the boot sector, cool!

So step 1 was to make a Drive Image XML copy of each hard drive partition from the computer to an external USB drive. (Since I'm comfortable with Drive Image XML, I felt it would be a safe "backup")

Step 2 was to use Self Image to copy the entire disk (including 2 extra partitions HP made to contain restore software and drivers) using Self Image. Because I wasn't using the hard drive, none of the files were in use, so it was quick and reliable.

Step 3 was to re-do step 2, but this time with an NTFS enabled USB drive, since the final file (for this 75GB Hard Drive) was around 22GB, and FAT 32 only supports around 4GB per file. (boo FAT 32!)

And, that anticlimactically concludes Part 1 of Adventures in Drive Imaging. Visit us next time for Part 2 - Making us need the image, where I will describe how I formatted the whole drive and installed Linux, just to make sure I totally changed the Hard Drive's contents and layout.