Trying to create drive image.

Hi.

I am trying to create a backup drive image of my hard drive. I used Drive Image XML and managed to create the files but I can't find clear instructions on what to do now. Can I just copy them to disk or do I need a special program. And then how do I do the actual reinstall. I tried to create a bootable disk using pebuilder but when I tried to burn the disk it said the path was invalid. It had warned that CD that I got the windows installation files from was OEM, but there is not much I can do about that.

Also are there better programs or methods that I could try?

Thanks for any help.

Edit: Moved topic from XP to the more appropriate forum. ~ Animal

If you have more than one hard drive...you could simply use a cloning program to make an exact duplicate of your hard drive...rather than backing up using software which might have to first be installed in Windows to work.

With a cloned drive, it is an exact duplicate. In the event of problems on the system or with the hard drive, all that's required is to remove the Old Drive and insert the Second Drive.

Example of a program that facilitates such cloning (free version), EASEUS Partition Master is a magic partition manager software for Windows 2000-XP-Vista-2003- - http://www.partition-tool.com/

And...there are backup software programs which do not necessarily have to be installed in XP to restore a backup...but I have no personal familiarity with such.

Louis

Hi.

I am trying to create a backup drive image of my hard drive. I used Drive Image XML and managed to create the files but I can't find clear instructions on what to do now. Can I just copy them to disk or do I need a special program. And then how do I do the actual reinstall. I tried to create a bootable disk using pebuilder but when I tried to burn the disk it said the path was invalid. It had warned that CD that I got the windows installation files from was OEM, but there is not much I can do about that.

Also are there better programs or methods that I could try?

Thanks for any help.

hi silon and garfunkel,

My best advice to you is to take a look at this very informative and workable solution - if your install files are in a named folder your image should be named the same - take a look at this. If you want to create an image then I would always choose this

Best regards,
chameleon437

Thanks to everyone for the advice. If I can't get this to work I will give those other options a try.

As for my install files they are in a folder in PE Builder called i386. They were coppied there from my windows CD by PE Builder. The problem is that when I try to build the bootable disk it can't find a file it wants "layout.inf". And says it is an invalid path. When I looked the file was not there. If anyone knows what I can do that would be great.

After reading further from the links provided above I think that I have found a solution.

Thanks.