8 replies to this topic

[Mark]

I want to be able to image my Windows drive and store it on a bootable USB drive, with software that can restore the image again. What's the best option to achieve this?

Thanks.

[MorganX]

If you're on Windows 7 use the Windows DVD Download Tool (google) to make a bootable System Repair Disk or Windows 7 Install Media. Then use Backup & Restore to create a System Image. Needless to say you will need a fairly large USB but that's no problem. What I did was save the image on a USB 3.0 portable for added speed. I copied the USB 3.0 drivers to the bootable USB. When you boot from USB and select repair, before choosing restore from image, choose load drivers and load USB 3.0 drivers. There's a lot to play with but Windows 7 system restore is quite reliable and pretty quick. Saved me many times, never failed. [needless to say if you use regular usb 2.0 you won't need to load any drivers]

[AchromiciA]

There are a number of solutions that can give you a bootable USB drive.

• Use Windows AIK to build a bootable version of windows and put it onto an external hard drive/thumb drive, however I find this one probably the most convoluted of the lot.
  
• Use a program called WinBuilder which has a project called Win7PE_SE which works awesomely.
  
• Using BartPE which uses a cut down version of windows XP to boot into - which I used for a number of years when working as an IT admin.
  
• Using Clonezilla open source project which I haven't had a lot of experience with but it seems to work well

Any of these options can help you make a portable version of an OS that you can boot into. To capture the image of your computer and restore you must firstly learn how to sysprep a windows computer. Sysprep will allow your computer to be captured and restored time and time again - even on different hardware makeups. Once you know how to do this you can use a number of programs to capture/restore your computer's image. Note: Ensure you have an external hard drive large enough to capture the whole disk of your computer.

• imagex is Microsoft's solution for capturing and restoring images
  
• Clonezilla that I noted above is for just this
  
• There was another I think was called RapidDeploy that I used all the time but I use WDS now so I've long forgotten where I got it.

There are heaps of articles all over the web and hopefully the above can get you started and then they should help you out.

[Mark]

Hi, I think I might have been a little unclear...

What I want on the USB device is:
mywindowsbackup.iso
some software to restore mywindowsbackup.iso which can be booted from the usb stick

Thanks for your replies so far!

Edit- ideally an app that allows for strong compression would be appreciated. I just made a system backup with windows backup and it made a 17.5GB set of folders for my 13.0GB worth of files! (Just have drivers installed, some small apps, moved hibernation file and page file to alternative drive)

It might be pushing it but I think with strong compression I might be able to squeeze the backup onto a 8gb thumb drive...

[MorganX]

Mark, on 04 August 2012 - 07:18, said:

Hi, I think I might have been a little unclear...

What I want on the USB device is:
mywindowsbackup.iso
some software to restore mywindowsbackup.iso which can be booted from the usb stick

Thanks for your replies so far!

Edit- ideally an app that allows for strong compression would be appreciated. I just made a system backup with windows backup and it made a 17.5GB set of folders for my 13.0GB worth of files! (Just have drivers installed, some small apps, moved hibernation file and page file to alternative drive)

It might be pushing it but I think with strong compression I might be able to squeeze the backup onto a 8gb thumb drive...

I would recommend getting a cheap 32Gig Flash drive and using Windows' built in image restore.

[+sc302]

Mark, on 04 August 2012 - 07:18, said:

It might be pushing it but I think with strong compression I might be able to squeeze the backup onto a 8gb thumb drive...

What does your drive consist of? compressed pictures or videos or pdf, yeah no that isn't going to happen on a 8gb usb. compression works great on non compressed formats, compression doesn't work so well on previously compressed files.

[Mark]

Decided to use Clonezilla bootable. I managed to compress down to 6GB with default settings which is fine for my 8GB drive. Thanks everyone

(Obviously, Windows compresses fairly well because it's only 4GB max to start with on an ISO. I've only installed essential apps at this point and drivers so it's still fairly small )

[Mark]

One more very important question...

There can apparently be alignment issues when cloning from a HDD to an SSD, but does the same issue exist if I'm making and restoring an image from the same SSD?

Thanks.

[Mark]

Should I take the lack of responses as "it'll be fine if you're doing it from the same drive"?