Need help making a DVD image of my hard drive.

[Staz]

I am about to reload my PC from scratch as I have some new hardware to install. Once I have my OS loaded and patched, and all my applications installed and configured, I want to burn an image of my hard drive to a bootable DVD that I can use to restore it to that point when ever I want. Basically, I want to make my own restore CD, much like the ones that come with new systems. However, I want to use my DVD burner so I can have a full 4.7G image on one DVD, which means I can load most of what I want on my system before the image is taken.

Things that I would need details on would be what program to use to create the image, and how to make a bootable DVD that contains everything that would be needed to wipe my existing hard drive, format it, and install the new image, all with a minimal amount of user intervention.

Since I have never done anything like this before, I would need a step by step process on how to do this. Can anyone help me out???

 

[Staz]

Will this do everything I need?

Acronis True Image 8.0

 

[boomerang]

Yes, Acronis will do it.

To restore from your image you would;

Boot from the Bootable Rescue Media you would create after installing Acronis.

When prompted insert your DVD image and follow the instructions.

Edit: I believe you could do want you want, i.e. incorporate both the Rescue Media and the image on the same DVD. I am not certain if it would work, or if any unusual steps would have to be taken. I'd think you would need to partition the DVD to have one partition for the Rescue and another for the Image.

I do not know if it is possible to partition a DVD.

 

[Hurricane Andrew]

Never used Acronis, but have hard good things about it. Since I beta test for Symantec, I have a nice gratis command line version of Ghost 2003. Very nice, very fast, and very easy (once I created a bootable CD ala PE Builder...not having a floppy can be a drag every now and then...).

 

[Leros]

I found Acronis True Image 8.0 to be about three times as fast as Norton Ghost 2003. Also, Acronis is much more user friendly. It also does incremental backups. True Image is just much better than Ghost.

 

[BlueWeasel]

More info here