How do I make a restore partition on a hard drive?

[Parasitic]

Is it possible to utilize Windows XP's boot loader to make a bootable partition that runs the XP installer upon selection?

I'm thinking about making one of those for my parents' old computer that has a busted DVD burner that works 25% of the time.

 

[Trashman]

I'd be interested in doing something like as well for future builds. I have done a "ghost" image on dvd in the past, i'm sure there are pro's and con's to each, good question Parasitic...was curious how oem's setup partitions for this task, shouldn't be to difficult.

 

[corkyg]

You would be better off placing such a thing on something external, like a DVD disk that can be made bootable. A Restore partition on the system HDD is next to useless. How do you access it with a HDD failure?

Of course, you could also place it on more than one HDD. That would be OK. But, if you are going to do that, why not just clone your good HDD to another HDD, making a duplicate. Then if you have a failure, just swap HDDs and life goes on.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: Trashman
was curious how oem's setup partitions for this task, shouldn't be to difficult.

They use third-party OEM solutions like SoThinks' PC Angel.

 

[pcgeek11]

Acronis TrueImage will do exactly that: Called the " Acronis Secure Zone ". It will shrink the existing partition and make a hidden partition on the disk. You then use Acronis to backup the hard disk to this secure zone. It will give you a prompt at boot to press F11 to activate the restore which boots a full version of Acronis from the secure zone partition to restore it back. The nice thing is you can keep this partition backup up to date and current by doing incremental or differential backups.

You can also make a Bootable CD / DVD that will do the same.

pcgeek11

 

[Parasitic]

Originally posted by: corkyg
You would be better off placing such a thing on something external, like a DVD disk that can be made bootable. A Restore partition on the system HDD is next to useless. How do you access it with a HDD failure?

Of course, you could also place it on more than one HDD. That would be OK. But, if you are going to do that, why not just clone your good HDD to another HDD, making a duplicate. Then if you have a failure, just swap HDDs and life goes on.

DVD backups are out of the question...there's something wrong with the DVD drive in the laptop and the computer won't boot from an external USB DVD burner. The drive is busted in such a way that file corrupt or unreadable errors would pop up during XP installation, preventing it to go further. This was the case with an OEM geninue disc and several burned TechNet ISO's. Every time I had to reinstall Windows XP for them it's a gigantic project where I would have to repeatedly burn CD's, use different burners or redownload ISO's to get the installation to continue.

I guess getting another HDD is an okay idea, but the laptop isn't very new and it's PATA only. So I'd have to find an 2.5" PATA-to-USB enclosure as well as 2.5" PATA hard drives that will become increasingly hard to find and expensive. Yes, I guess I can just get them a new computer but then when does this ever end?