Reinstalling your OP the easy way...

[MrJoe]

A friend of mine got a new Dell Laptop and it came with a feature I have never seen before. If you want to restore your HD back to factory standard, you just type a password from c: and it formats and installs Win98 and any other software that came with the PC. Is this some sort of image that is on is software? I would love to be able to do this when even I want to reinstall. Can I? How?

 

[owensdj]

MrJoe, I think Symantec's Ghost software can do something similar to that. Here's the link:
Ghost 2001

 

[IamDavid]

I use Powerquest Dirive Image Pro and it does the same thing.. Best program to own

 

[MrJoe]

Thanks....one question though. Where does this image reside? On a seperate partition or on another HD?

 

[Raincity]

It can done on both its up to you where to store it as long that its not on the same partition you made the image from. Ghost 2001 will auto span the drive image and let you store it on cdr,s or cdrw,s if you want.

Rain

 

[MrJoe]

So I guess the next question is how is the best way of going about it? I would assume that you would want to create this "image" of your system after a fresh install. My thought would be to format, then add OS of choice, update all drivers, install any software needed then create your image?

 

[UnixFreak]

I just run red hat, I dont have to worry about it! LMFAO!! But seriously, most of these programs do create a small partition, and copy the image there (d They work great really. You can sort of set something like this up, create a small partition and copy the win98 folder from your disk here, with all the cabs, and copy the setup.exe program from the CD to the root of that partition. You will also want to copy files such as format and scandisk that are not available on the CD, to this drive. Create a batch file such as this:

@echo off
cd \
echo. Running this file will delete all software and echo. restore OS.
echo. Hit control-C now to cancel
pause
D:\format C:\ /s
D:\setup.exe

name it rescue.bat or something, pretty much same thing. I had something like this setup when I used to run windows machines a lot.



<< Thanks....one question though. Where does this image reside? On a seperate partition or on another HD? >>