Subscribe to our Never Re-install Windows Again Part 3: Imaging your hard drive
In this, the third part of this series Gizmo shows to image your system drive using the free imaging program DriveImage XML In Part 2 of this series I showed how to partition (or divide) your current C: drive into two smaller drives (partitions) so that the first partition C: contain your Windows operating system (and some of your data) while the second partition contains just data. In this part I'll show you how to create an image or snapshot of your Windows partition using a free imaging program called DriveImage XML. Step 1: Setting Up DriveImage XML DriveImage XML is a free imaging program that's particularly easy to use. It's not particularly fast but it does have a great advantage of many of the other free imaging programs: it forms part of the standard collection of utilities on the UBCD4Win bootable rescue disk. That means that if your Windows system becomes unbootable you can restore a working image of your system drive by booting from a UBCD4Win CD and running DriveImage XML. Once you have restored the image your PC should boot into Windows normally. That's fine for restoring an image or recovering an unbootable PC but you don't need to run DriveImage XML from a boot CD to create an image. To create an image you can run DriveImage XML directly from Windows rather than a CD. In fact that's exactly what we are going to do is this tutorial. If you ever need to run UBCD4Win to recover an unbootable PC or restore an image the product looks and works the same when run from a boot CD as it does from Windows. Download DriveImage XML from here and install it on your PC. It's a 1.5MB download and will work on Windows XP or later though I haven't tried it myself with Vista. Step 2: Setup the Storage Area for your Image In the previous part of this series we created a separate data partition. We will use this partition to store the image of our C: drive that we create with DriveImage XML. Here's what our disk looked like after we had created the data partition:
So we are going to create an image of C:, our system drive and store it on F: our data drive. Note your data drive may have another drive letter other than F: If you have an second physical hard drive or an external USB drive you could store your image files there. However I suggest you first store it on the data partition of your main hard drive and then later copy it to your second drive. That way you'll have two backup copies. First lets' go to our data drive and create a special folder called "images" to hold our image files. Do that now. When finished you data drive should look something like this: 
Step 3: Create the Drive Image Startup DriveImage XML. You should see a screen that looks something like this: 
Select the backup option. You will then see this screen:
Select the C: drive and press Next. This will start the backup wizard.
Press Next
Enter the storage location for the image file into the "Directory" box. In this example I've entered F:\images.
You have some decisions to make with the options. Here's what they mean:
Raw mode means that every sector on you system file will be copied even sectors without data. Most users will want to leave this box unchecked as the image creation process will take a lot longer if you copy unused sectors.
The Split large files option will split the image file into several smaller files each small enough to be burnt to a CD. If you don't intend to burn to CD then uncheck this option.
Compressing your file will roughly halve the size of the resulting image file but will lengthen the time it takes to burn an image. Most users will want to check this option to save space.
In the following examples I used the default options but I suspect most users would check "compressed" but leave both "Raw mode" and "Split large files" unchecked.
Leave the Hot Imaging Strategy options set to the default values.
Once you have set your options click Next and the backup process will start.
Don't be too alarmed at the "time remaining" figure. It will start very high but drop rapidly as the backup continues. DriveImage XML is still slow though. This particular backup ended up taking 1 hour 50 minutes while the commercial imaging program Acronis True Image took only 22 minutes to backup the same drive. Still if you setup DriveImage XML to run overnight it really doesn't matter.
When the imaging is completed go to the location where you stored you image file and make sure it's there. Here's what my imaging folder looked like:
Here you can clearly see how DriveImage XML has broken up the image file into small, CD-size chunks. If you want a CD backup you could then use your CD burner to burn each file to CD. That's a lot of CDs. With external hard drives now so cheap it seems a lot of effort to me but I do accept that CDs are good for offsite backup.
Restoring an image using DriveImage XML is simplicity itself. Just select the Restore option from the opening page, select the image you want to restore and you are done!
Well that's it folks. In this three part series I've shown you how to:
- Divide your hard drive into a system partition and a data partition
- Move your data from the system partition to the data partition
- Backup your system drive using DriveImage XML
Now next time your Windows get corrupted you can recover your Windows system from your backup image.
A Note on Restoring Images
You can't restore an image to your C: drive while Windows is running from your C: drive. When you think about it this has to be the case as the process of restoring the image will write over the running version of Windows.
So how do you restore a C: drive image?
Easy. You boot your PC from a UBCD4Win boot CD, run DriveImage XML from the CD and then restore your image.
You'll also need a boot disk if your system becomes unbootable as you won't be able to run DriveImage XML from your PC as it isn't working!
So it pays to go to the trouble of making a UBCD4Win boot disk and to have this available before you encounter a problem.
You can find instructions how to make your own UBCD4Win boot disk here.
Well that's the end of this three part series folks.
Remember to backup your system drive often. I do it at least once a week but average users can get away with doing it monthly.
Once you've set this up "you'll never need to re-install Windows again." :>)
Never Re-install Windows Again: Part 2
Never Re-install Windows Again: Part 1
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I had been using DriveImage XML to image my C drive periodically for some time, thinking I would be ready in the event of a drive failure or hard drive upgrade. The upgrade came first with the purchase of a new hard drive, but when I restored my DiveImage XML image to the new drive, it would not boot. This is a 6 year old Dell Dimension 4550 system. I ended up using the trial of Acronis True Image Home 2009 to clone the drive with no problem. Can anyone explain why the drive wouldn't boot after restoring a DriveImage XML image? I even tried changing the drive ID as suggest in the DriveImage XML FAQs. Also, the partition in the new drive was set to primary and active. I'm puzzled by this. I hope someone can help. Thanks!
Great article Gizmo.
I only used part 2, but I read the whole thing.
I have 3 almost identical HDDs' (the C drive is getting a bit dodgy), and I was already using DriveImage XML but it wouldn't let me restore (or disk to disk) the image to a drive of exactly the same size as my C drive. Probably because windows puts some smeg on every drive installed, making it look smaller than it really is. So I re-sized and partitioned, and re-imaged C:. As I write this I am watching DriveImage-XML running in BartPE quite happily restore the image to one of my other drives.... finished. Restart, del to enter bios, change boot drive, reboot, YES! YES! YES! It Lives! lol (: Cheers m8 -Adrian down Under
OK I have read the entire article and I am not sure if this is what I need to do. Here is my problem. I have two drives both have operating OS on them and each of them have 1 program that I want to combine on to either one of the drives.
drive 1 has the program EMB
drive 2 has the program BOS
I have lost the software for both of the programs so reinstalling them from the disk is not an option. I have plug in the drives and one remains as original the C drive and the other one becomes drive F. Neither of these programs will run if they are not in the C drive. I have searched for the configuration files to make it look in the F drive but not able to located them. I does not matter if I make one the master and the other a slave the drive number still becomes "C:" and "F:".... making the other program inoperable.
Would doing what is noted in the article resolve my problems of getting both of the programs on to one drive????
You may be able to use the "Computer Management" tool to change drive letters. But you can only have one C: drive at a time. However I seriously doubt you can use an imaging tool to combine 2 drives into one. If these programs are registered to you, your best bet is contacting the program vendors. Good luck.
Just read all 3 parts and am wondering what advantage this has over simply doing an image of the entire C drive each month and incremental backup once a week. Then if there is a crash, or a virus, simply restore the entire C drive. Also, with an imaging program like Snapshot you can exclude files that are large and transitory like any .avi files.
Gizmo says that he images the C partition once a week. What about the other partitions, don't they need some form of backup? If so, then you're backing up or imaging the same files as mentioned in the above paragraph but in two steps. I fail to see the advantage. What am I missing?
There is, of course, nothing "wrong" with your method. Gizmo is addressing the problem from the standpoint of someone who only has one hard disk; where do you store the image? When he wrote the original article, cheap USB drives were not available, and the merits of disk partitioning were not widely known. The idea of separating Data and System is partly to make the System as small as possible, and, as you hint, to allow for different backup schedules and methods. Just a couple of years ago, system images took a long time to make and keeping it small was a real advantage, although this simply isn't critical on today's more powerful machines and with much improved sware. I backup (image) System every couple of weeks; but Data gets backupped every day.
hello i have a problem.
I am using driveimage xml to restore my see c drive.I boot my pc using active boot disk.My os is vista.Then i run xml,it runs fine.i can browse file and extract them brillant.But when i go to restore i get an error unable to lock drive and then vss not started.Vss can not be started because my os is not running.The xml program will continue the restore without locking or vss.will this restore work?
Awesome guide. Wish I had found it 2 days ago instead of going through some painful reinstalls. Thanks so much for this.
Excellent set of articles, cheers!
Thank you very much for this guide. It was helpful for those looking for Freeware solutions to creating a drive image, and those who just generally do not like re-installing Windows. A reminder out there to everyone - be sure you TEST YOUR BACKUP after its creation! You do not want the horror of needing to restore your drive, only to find the image did not burn properly!
I plan to create an image and store it on one DVD (that is, a non-split image burned to a single DVD) to hold my image of a fresh XP install. Considering the amount of space I am using right now, I don't think the compressed backup image will exceed 4GB. My question is: Will DriveImage XML allow me to restore an image from a single DVD, as opposed to several CDs?
To answer my question: you can use DriveImage XML from the UBCD4Win to restore an image stored on a single DVD disc. :: While testing, DriveImage XML and the entire CD-loaded Windows environment froze after ejecting the UBCD4Win in order to load the DVD. So, if your system does not have two optical drives (mine does, fortunately), you can load the .XML image either from a non-target partition on your hard disk, or a USB drive.
Thanks again for this guide!
I have some more ideas on this subject.
If you partition your hard drive in the first place you can create storage departments on other partitions. Therefore your computer stays in top shape as you are not actulally storing anything on c: drive.
So for example this is what you do
1. When installing the operating system partition your hard drive into two. (you can make those into more later) See how to delete a partition so you can create more..
2. When your computer is running and you have installed the programs you need set a system restore point for C: drive so you can always go back to the best times. Here's how to use system restore.
3. Now with the rest of the leftover partition you can
Delete, merge, create, and rename a partition without formatting Windows.
You can make one a backup, one for files and so on... Now if you computer crashes it will only effect C: drive. If you can't get into windows to restore it then this is when you will need the hard drive image to restore your computer.
Vista has this all built in. I was able to do an image backup (Vista calls it "Back up Computer") to an external USB hard drive, then I wiped my hard drive and was able to restore it via the Vista install disk ("Repair"). It was pretty easy and worked well.
I think you can even backup/restore to/from other PC's on your network.
I used Acronis Trueimage prior to Vista, but prefer Vista's backup/restore.
Note that if your system files are on a RAID disk array (most modern motherboards have this feature), boot disks may not recognize the array and you may not be able to restore or partition using boot disks. The Vista install disk does see RAID arrays.
"Back up Computer" and scheduled daily file backups (also built into Vista) is a good backup routine and very easy to do.
I would love to make a boot disk for my computer but it seems impossible. A year ago I bought a second hand recycled computer which runs the Windows 2000 OS. Though I have UBCD4Win I can't use it to create a boot CD because it doesn't work with Windows 2000 and apart from this, I don't have the original installation CD-ROM.
Despite this, while the computer was running well I made an image of my entire 'C' drive using DriveImage XML. That image is now burned to a DVD. I didn't create a partition as Gizmo warned that this was an inherently risky business and should only be undertaken if you have a back-up, installation CDs and the requisite know-how.
So, without a partition on the hard drive it seems the only way I can restore the image to it is by using a boot disk. Is this a vicious circle or have I overlooked something?
I actually have the four boot disks (floppies) for Windows 2000. Can I boot from those and insert the DVD containing the image I want to restore? If so, how is it done? And how do I access the DriveImage XML software if I'm not booting from the 'C' drive?
Hi This is a good article , but how can I have the documents and settings folder install on a seperate partition when doing a new install in xp pro ?
thanks
Use nLite
How do I back up my image files to DVD. Useing Nero, I can burn the first 6 files to a DVD but then when I try to burn the remaining image files to a second DVD, it wont let me. Nero keeps asking for the first disc. when I insert the first disc into the DVD rw Nero ejects the disc and says there is not enough space. Even if I add all of the image files to Nero, It still says there is not enough space.
Why wont these image files burn to 2 or 3 different DVD's?
Thanks for any further help.
Andy
RSJ HD IMAGE freeware works way better, creating an image on a hd or burning non-bootable DVD/CD with the compressed image. Only need a bootable Pendrive and a .exe that is created by the program.
Just a note that with DriveImage XML you can only restore your data to a partition that is exactly the same size or larger, regardless of the data size. In this case, restoring directly from the F: would not be allowed since it is larger than the C: target partition.
It's only storing the image file(s) on F drive. You can store the image of a 20GB drive on a 1TB drive if you so choose. You are limited to restoring the image to a drive 20GB or larger.
So in this case, restoring the image from a the larger F:drive would work.
I read this three part series and to this procedure is alright as long as it's just Windows that gets corrupted. if you have a hard drive failure this will do you know good because you have stored the recovery image on the same hard drive and it will be lost with the hard drive. You can't restore an image that doesnt exist anymore.
There should have been a fourth part explaining how to back up an image to a CD/DVD or external hard drive and how to restore it from there onto a new hardrive.
If I need to reinstall Windows it's usually because of a hard drive failure not because Windows became corrupted and this procedure will not help you then.
How do I back up my image files to DVD. Useing Nero, I can burn the first 6 files to a DVD but then when I try to burn the remaining image files to a second DVD, it wont let me. Nero keeps asking for the first disc. when I insert the first disc into the DVD rw Nero ejects the disc and says there is not enough space. Even if I add all of the image files to Nero, It still says there is not enough space.
Why wont these image files burn to 2 or 3 different DVD's?
Thanks for any further help.
Andy
This is good when you have a nice clean install and I will use it next time. I wish there was a magical software that would fix any corruption which is unavoidable after say a year of heavy usage.