Reinstalling Windows 7

Infam0us

Infam0us

Infam0us

Soldato
Joined
16 Oct 2008
Posts
3,427
Location
Birmingham
Hey guys,

I have a boot issue with my Windows 7 and wish to reinstall.

Is there a way of saving all my settings, wallpaper, Windows updates and so forth on a separate hardrive and then once I've installed Windows 7 again reverting back to the settings I had previously backed up with it?

I think it was called slipstreaming on XP but I really have no idea :)
 
the easy transfer wizard is probably the simplest method. It should be included in every w7 install and it's also on the w7 disk.

You can backup user accounts (including docs, settings etc) to a network share (comes under the removable disk option i believe and NOT the network option), portable drive or just copy it directly to another PC on a network.

Alternatively check out USMT 4.0 to migrate your settings
 
Thanks, saving it now. I do have a question though, as my User Account is 284MB I saved that fine, but the shared items were over 400GB. Just wondering what they are? Is it my other two storage HDD's its picking up?
 
if you click on the customize link below the shared items link it will tell you what folders it's including and why its 400gb
 
You should get a disk image of your HDD once you are done. Then in future you can just reapply the image if anything happens to your OS. :)
 
Thanks for the help :) When I reinstall Windows and I choose to use this image will it return it to exactly the way it was before, bar installed games and programs?
 
if you make a full drive image as SiriusB suggested then everything will be as it was when you created the image....installed programs, settings, any documents etc.

It may be better to do a complete install of windows, any games and updates etc then make an image of it before putting your documents back on, then just make sure you keep regular backups of your documents and settings. that way if you need to restore the image you won't have aload of old documents you dont want/need in there too.
 
It depends when you take the image. I do a backup image of my OS every day and save it to my server. So even if something really bad happened to my SSD/OS/whatever, at most I lose 24 hours of changes. Though with pretty much all my documents and media being saved elsewhere I theoretically wouldn't lose anything of consequence! :)
 
SiriusB said:
It depends when you take the image. I do a backup image of my OS every day and save it to my server. So even if something really bad happened to my SSD/OS/whatever, at most I lose 24 hours of changes. Though with pretty much all my documents and media being saved elsewhere I theoretically wouldn't lose anything of consequence! :)
Click to expand...

this is actually a better idea (providing you have the space)....infact this is pretty much what I do lol

I use the Windows Backup option to make a full drive backup once a week to a file server. It's automated and doesn't really require you to stop what ever you're doing
 
Is that the "Create System Image" option on backup? I've made one of those in the past and when I had a faulty installation and reinstalled it said there was an unknown error. I'm worried that my boot error may be passed along if I make a system image, is this likely to happen?
 
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