How do I back up Vista?

[kinhteroi]

My sons laptop took a dump last night. How do I back up Vistakhuon mau He turned it on to do his homework, it got past the splash screen then ... nothing. No Vista. just a black screen.
Repair installation did not work.
Restore point did not work.
Safe mode..it hangs up at CRCDRIVER.SYS Will not go past it.
Only option I have is to try and re-install everything from scratch. EEEch!
The repair software had a restore from backup option. Since it was never backed up, I could not restore that way.
I just bought a 500Gig external drive and downloaded Acronis. (If thats what I need.)
So somewhere along the way, I make an image of the hard drive. And a few days later, Vista dies again. If Acronis is the right software, how would I go about restoring the image to the laptop? would I have to install Vista then Acronis, then tell it to transfer the image back? I'm kind of lost here. Or would I have a copy of Acronis on a seperate partition on the external drive and work it from there? Transfer the saved image to the black drive?
I'm familiar with Acronis unless someone has a better/easier way to do this. I just downloaded about 18 drivers from Sagers website. There has got to be an easier way.!
FYI Laptop is a Sager NP2096, Vista Premium 64 bit, 320G HD, 4G Ram, P8600 CPU, 9600M GT GPU.

 

[kinhteroi]

Boot CD of Acronis, anyone know how to create?

 

[snowdog]

Sorry I don't use acronis ( so don't know how to make an arconis bootable cd) but always used norton ghost, but have you considered this:

Install vista on a different hdd/pc.
Search for CRCDRIVER.SYS and copy it over to your old install.
Try safe mode again.

Dad always used to fix his install by copying damaged/missing files from one install to another.

 

[Mattus]

Yep, you need the boot CD. IIRC you need to create it from a machine with Acronis installed - got another PC to hand?

Also, if Vista has died twice in a week, the laptop has a hardware problem. I'd be running Memtest on the RAM to start with.