Disk imaging

[D-Dan]

Hi guys - thought I'd share.

I'm preparing to do an in place upgrade of my main PC (Vista) to Win 7, and wanted to make a reliable image of my system so that I can restore if anything goes wrong.

I use a 64 Bit OS, which rules out many imaging programs, and even those that claim to be 64bit compatible failed miserably to successfully create an image. I was almost resigned to having to pay for commercial backup software, when I came across PING.

This is free, open source. It's Linux based and you download an ISO, burn it to CD and boot from it. Don't panic about it being Linux based - it worked flawlessly on a test backup and restore of PC2 (backing up over the network in that case). Maybe a bit slow - the test backup too 38 minutes to backup, and 20 minutes to restore a 9Gb OS (a relatively clean install of Win 7), and the backup of my main system took 3 hours (100Gb).

Simple to use, with a complete walkthrough in the online documentation. The only thing worth mentioning is if you are going to backup to a shared folder on another machine, read the prerequisites in the documentation first - you need to install the directory structure on the target PC.

Backing up to a local HD is pretty much "just do it".

I highly recommend this.

Steve 

[Glenn]

Nice find Steve

[Rik]

Karmic find, Steve. 

[D-Dan]

As an aside, apart from a couple of niggles (took a couple of goes to get my gfx card drivers working, and the version of Nvidia ethernet drivers I was using won't play with Win 7, and one or two other small niggles - for example the upgrade advisor never mentioned Comodo firewall, but it would have worked much better if I'd uninstalled first - I finished up having to uninstall and re-install anyway) the Upgrade seems to have gone OK. Took about three hours, and a couple more hours working past these problems, but still a hell of a lot less time and trouble than a clean install would have been.

I'll keep the full system disk image for a little time yet, though - just in case 

Steve