Home | Software | System Utilities
A Restore Disk is one of the important tools that you must have if you a have PC. When you buy a computer from the computer store it comes preinstalled with an Operating System, in most cases Windows. It comes accompanied with a Recovery Disk which allows you to recover your original Windows installation in the event of a failure. OSes like Windows become very slow in time. Simple usage of the system like net surfing, can damage your registries by allowing to certain sites install players, plug-ins and software. If you don’t install them you can’t do your job, so you you must install these. There are so many computer programs today that you must install on a fresh installed Windows OS to benefit from it, not to speak of device drivers, windows updates and patches, that a complete reinstall of Windows with all updates can take a long time, at least a few hours. Not to mention specific configuration settings and profile settings used everyday. It is the reason why you must use a back-up solution, a sort of restoration of your Operating System. This can save you lot of time needed by a fresh install of your Windows Operating System. You can have all your data and all your configuration restored at the date when you installed your system. And this does not imply advanced computer knowledge or risky maneuvers. Another benefit is that it can be performed on all Windows platforms (95, 96, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, NT). There are special tools for this operation like Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image. They are both simple, fast, effective and no cost. How they work? They do a clone of your desired hard drive partition, in our case C:\ partition (if we suppose that Windows is installed on C:\). This is an image file with all the files contained on that partition: Windows Operating System, profile folders, device drivers and installed programs. All files are copied on that image. So, a recommendation: before you make this recovery disk is to proper install Windows with all its drivers, service packs if it’s the case, patches and updates, programs that you need and personal user settings. Just before you make a clone of your Windows OS I recommend you to use the computer for a few days, until you have the complete installation and configuration you use daily. After that just install Norton Ghost or Acronis. Follow the instructions (they have a help menu) for creating a boot floppy disk or CD/DVD. Boot from them and do the clone of your Windows partition to an image file to another partition. Reboot Windows from hard disk and copy that image in a DVD (or somewhere safe). Later, when your Windows installation has problems, it will be slow, having problems and errors at boot time, you just boot from the floppy/CD Norton Ghost created disk and you select to restore your saved image file of the system which contains your Windows installation.
Article Source: http://www.approvedarticles.com
Please Rate this Article
5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5
# of Ratings = 3 | Rating = 5/5
