windows 7 - Custom system restore DVD?

07
2014-07
  • Rushino

    I am looking for a way to make a clone of a partition on a DVD where the client will actually be able to restore the partition himself without much hassle.

    Any ideas ?

    • Answers
  • Kibbee

    I've used System Rescue CD to make a bootable image of my machine. There are couple limitations I don't like, such as you can't restore the image onto a smaller hard drive, even if your image only has a small amount of data, and also related, if you restore onto a larger drive, you will have a partition which is the same size as the partition you backed up. Other than that, it works great. The backup can be compressed quite small, and can be stored on a USB stick or USB hard disk for later use.

  • Wesley

    You'll want to consider two resources:

    1. The Microsoft OPK Deployment Kit. Check out the document titled "Creating a Hard Disk Recovery Solution for Windows 7"
    2. Third party tools such as one by a company called FarStone. I won't link to it directly since I haven't tested it myself and I'm slightly skeptical of the website.

    There aren't a ton of third party tools out there to do this, and there's probably a good reason for that. I would strongly suggest looking at the OEM Preinstallation Kit and using that as a base for making your recovery partition.

  • MikeyB

    This is actually a brilliantly simple process.

    The mksysb command creates an installable system image from a partition and the mkdvd command can be used to write this image out as a bootable DVD.

    With this DVD, you can restore the system to the point at which the mksysb snapshot was taken.

  • voretaq7

    You really can't do wrong with dump(8) and restore(8). On most modern systems you can even send the output directly to a DVD device.

    If you need something a little more bare-metal there's always dd(1), but that's nowhere near as user-friendly...


    • Related Question

    backup - Shadow copy to clone system volume on Windows XP
  • ARF

    I am looking for a program that uses shadow copy to copy the contents of a Windows XP system volume that is running.

    I.e. I want to clone the system volume with the following snags: (1) I want to be able to select which files to copy (i.e. not the entire file system) (2) This is probably implied by (1), but I also have to avoid sector-by-sector copies (3) I do not want to clone a file system into an image file and restore to a 3rd drive but want to do a filesystem to filesystem copy

    All the backup/clone utilities I looked into stumble on one of above points. Any ideas?


    • Related Answers
  • Hannes de Jager

    Hope I understand the question correctly. If so have a look at Hobocopy

  • ARF

    Since this problem seems to be somewhat obscure, I thought I explain the solution I found.

    To copy a Windows system volume using volume shadow copy service, the best program seems to be ViceVersa (Fully functional trial on http://www.tgrmn.com/). I also tried the freeware "Shadow Copy" by Runtime Software but this is very buggy and has an terribly limited GUI.

    Also note, for some reason shadow copying the current user's profile seems to fail on Windows XP. So copy while running as some temporary user whose user directory you can exclude from the copy.

    Before trying to boot from the new harddrive, one also has to modify the drive-letter assignements in the Windows registrs ON THE NEW DRIVE: for this, load the system registry hive from the new drive and rename in "Mounted Devices" key:

    "\DosDevices\D:" to "\DosDevices\C:"

    Assuming that D was the drive letter for the new drive and C the drive letter of the system volume. If this is not done, Windows will appear to load but freeze just before it reaches the login screen. Do not forget to unload the registry hive after you are done, otherwise you may run into problems when rebooting from the old drive.