i just got windows xp installed again....
got all my programs installed and everything....

everything works great


but i have to do this like 2 a month.....

is there a program
that will back up everyone of my files the mbr and everything
then burn it to a DVD
my goal
is that all i have to do is stick in my dvd back up disk of windows and it will load up some program that will copy everything back to how it is now
with out the need to reinstall windows or any of my prgrams...

and possibly be able to format my drive(ntfs) before all of this...

if i were a programer i would make my own neat little program to do EXACLTY this
but i am prolly going to have to make some kinda boot disk or something to get this to work

i herd of norton ghost
but i am not sure if that will do exactly what i want



as any buddy done this with a DVD?????

Why are you asking this on a linux forum?

FIRST OF ALL
becuase i don't know a better forum and people respond quite quickly here

SECOND
i am asking the question in Non-*NIX Forums - General




another thing is

i usuallly don't have to reinstall linux all the time like do with windows....
so this problem is irrevalent for me in linux



unless you know a great WINDOWS forum out there
all i wanted to do was see if anyone knows....... or had any experience

so some real answere would more appreciated........

Check this out
http://www.partimage.org/

does this work for windows xp?


i guess it does support the ntfs

It has ntfs support yes

ok... but i don't have linux installed on this machince
only my server.......

and even with the bootable cd rom you can download.....

how would i format my drive for ntfs?

lets say i had an existing ntfs partition...

and i needed to whipe it clean and put the image file this program make back onto the disk....

Your windows drive will already be either NTFS or FAT32
you can save your partitions over a network

hmmm well i want to make a bootable dvd rom with the image on there....

You could create a bootable distro that extracts the saved image to the harddrive. There are already many bootable distro's just use one of them and add the image to it.

Fred Langa has described his method of backing up his drives in the Langalist a few times. I'll see if I can find the reference (some informationweek article he wrote - perhaps searching there will find it). You might want to check it out at www.langa.com or www.informationweek.com . I find that I am reading fewer of the words in his newsletter since I wiped Windows from my puny drive, though...