Image backup - a few questions - X-post

David WE Roberts · 2012-11-14T10:06:06+00:00

X-Post to uk.d-i-y because of the general knowledge there :-)I feel the need to take an image backup of my Vista partition prior to tinkering.It is a long time since I did this.Computer is a Dell XPS M1530 laptop.Disc has already been through the wars with a corrupt partition table which was finally recovered.So - firstly the disc layout is as follows taken from Disk Management:133MB FAT (no label) Primary - no idea what this is for - Linux boot partition?15GB NTFS (Recovery) Primary - 8.95GB free - presumably copy of the OS install media?196.45GB (OS (C:)) System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition- 30.52GB free - Vista9.5GB (no label) Primary - Linux Swap74.5 GB (no label) Primary - Linux2.5GB FAT32 (mediaDirect) Logical - Media Direct application/OS to allow PC to boot up into media server directly.Now there seem to be too many Primary partitions but this could just be a limitation of Disk Manager under Vista.I would need to fire up Linux to check what it looks like from that OS.I'm not bothered about securing the Linux bits as I use them rarely on this PC.I am certainly not bothered about the MediaDirect partition which doesn't seem compatible with Linux dual boot - when I tried to reinstall MediaDirect (complete with link to special button on keyboard) this trashed my partition table and I was lucky to get it back.Presumably to enable me to recover to this disk (or another) I need to back up the first three partitions.Also presumably I can't do this with Vista running.So what is the best (preferably free) tool to use for this?Can boot from CD or run from Linux (Ubuntu).Also, can this save the images in a filestore file or do I have to have a disc with unformatted space to copy the partition byte for byte?Oh, and if the FAT partition is Linux boot, can I mount it under Windows by assigning it a drive letter? I assume there is something marking it not to be mounted by Windows?Any advice gratefully accepted.CheersDave R

Nov 14, 2012 21 Replies

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David WE Roberts 13 years ago

Trivially the year 2000 was considered the millenium so they could have been released together :-)

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meow2222 13 years ago

IIRC Win2k was well before ME. For a while the main choice was 98 or 2k, with 2k requiring enormous amounts of ram for the time.

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