Some advice needed re: bootable iso files

lucid

lucid

lucid

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I have a little project on the go. It's a self-contained media PC for a friend. The friend is a PC numpty. No knowledge whatsoever. They also live a long way off, so if there's an issue I can't just pop round. So, I want to have some kind of disaster recovery plan in place should the O/S HDD burst in to flames or get abducted by aliens or eaten by the cat.

Now, this PC is never ever going to run anything other than XP Home Edition, XBMC, and a few bits to make copying DVDs easy.

We have a fresh install of XP Home and all the rest of the software is set up too. All of this is on a dedicated 80Gb HDD O/S drive. It runs sweet as a nut. All media is on a separate large drive. So we have two drives: one for the O/S and one for the media.

Please forgive me if I don't use the correct technical terms. You'll have to read between the lines if what I have written is unclear... Or you can ask me to clarify, but please don't bamboozle me with your superior technical knowledge. Keep it simple-plain-understandable-for-an-everyman language.

What I'd like to end up with is two things. The first is a recovery ISO that can live in a folder on the media drive. The second and more important thing, is a bootable version of this iso on a USB stick. The idea being that if the worst comes to the worst and a new O/S drive has to be installed or the existing drive has to be reformatted then the PC can boot from the USB stick and the HDD drive restored to todays snapshot of the O/S and other software from the files on the USB stick.

Before anyone mentions it, I'm pretty sure that XBMC will need to reload (re-scrape) all the thumbnails and data for films ripped after this system is installed. Yes, I accept that. That's fine. We can cope with that. It's not an issue.

So, how to make it so that in a disaster recovery situation the PC can boot a USB stick and the O/S drive files will be copied back to the HDD. I have the Hiren Boot CD, but am unsure which of the various tools (if any) can be used to create what I'm looking for.

The current size of the O/S files is 12.4Gb. The file system is NTFS.
I have a 16Gb USB stick. The file system is FAT32.

Can it be done? Can it be done with the software I have? If so, what exactly should I do in as close to a step-by-step guide as possible please?
 
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Use Macrium Reflect Free. Image the drive and create some boot media. There are guides on the official Macrium forums.
 
yashiro said:
Use Macrium Reflect Free. Image the drive and create some boot media. There are guides on the official Macrium forums.
Click to expand...
Well, I tried this but there seems to be a hitch. Macrium won't create bootable USB recovery media on anything less than Windows Vista. LINK

Since the Macrium support forum is only accessible after one has purchased a product I can't ask advice there. And even if I had purchased Macrium, it looks like I would have still been stuck .... Catch 22 :(

So, anyone else got any suggestions please?
 
Magic iso maker.

I have used this over the years for all sorts of similar tasks. Have run it on XP and win7.

Makes bootable image files. EDIT up to 10GB, may not be enough?

http://www.magiciso.com/
 
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Update: WintoFlash..........Now stuffed with horrible adware, popups and junk programs. I just spent an 90mins untangling all the junk it loaded. This includes some stuff that hijacks your browser. It's called Babylon search. It requires some fettling under the bonnet of each browser to completely irradiate. Nasty. Downloaders beware!!! Other that that the program looks promising.

One hurdle appears to be the image files created by Macrium. They don't seem to follow the format shown in the onscreen tutorial.

I have attempted to use MagicISO, but I don't see (or recognise) an option to make an ISO of the O/S drive. It seems geared towards ISOs of just files or discs. What do I do now??? :confused:
 
You could look at one of the various boot recovery tool CDs like Hiren's boot CD, then use one of the imaging tools on there to image the HDD to the USB stick. Or instead of having Hiren's on a disc you can also get that to boot from USB.

It won't be a totally easy insert disc, one click solution but with some instructions to go with it should be easy enough for even the most novice of users to be able to perform with the right guidance.
 
chaosophy said:
You could look at one of the various boot recovery tool CDs like Hiren's boot CD, then use one of the imaging tools on there to image the HDD to the USB stick. Or instead of having Hiren's on a disc you can also get that to boot from USB.

It won't be a totally easy insert disc, one click solution but with some instructions to go with it should be easy enough for even the most novice of users to be able to perform with the right guidance.
Click to expand...
So come on then. How do I do this... step by step.
 
lucid said:
Update: WintoFlash..........Now stuffed with horrible adware, popups and junk programs. I just spent an 90mins untangling all the junk it loaded. This includes some stuff that hijacks your browser. It's called Babylon search. It requires some fettling under the bonnet of each browser to completely irradiate. Nasty. Downloaders beware!!! Other that that the program looks promising.
Click to expand...

Never use the "Web install by BetterInstaller (fastest partner download)" link.

It is possible to download the .zip archive without installing any of the Babylon junk. After launching Wintoflash_downloader_by_betterinstaller, select the following options: Yes (UAC), Skip, Red X (top-right), Skip, Skip All.
 
lucid said:
So come on then. How do I do this... step by step.
Click to expand...

You can download Hiren's from here, you can also find out how to put it on a bootable usb stick, or just burn it onto a disc.

There are various guides available online for the various tools on there but I'd probably use Ghost, as per this video, that vid was just one of the first that came up on a google search but there appear to be others.

The only different things you'll want to do from that vid is loading Ghost with USB support, he went for 'normal'. And he only does a single partition, you may or may not want to do the whole disc.

Then to recover it is basically the same thing but you load the partition/disk form the image file, instead of to one.

edit: if you're unsure, try it on a partition you don't mind if you lose, or dig out an old HDD to test on. But to be honest it is fairly easy, I've used it where you can boot client/server on two PCs and image to file/disk over the network between them. Works really well.
 
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