How To make backup "image" files of your entire Windows "C:" drive.
(HowToMakeWinBackupImage beta v0.8, Bill Day 2007 compteam AT chem.duke.edu). A short, illustrated, step-by-step procedure for any windows user on how to make a backup image of entire C-drive. For the impatient, jump down to QUICKSTART section. For
newbies, before running on important pc, try it on a pc you don't care about (or an emulator like free Vitrual PC.)
INTRODUCTION/ OVERVIEW
If you google for "cloning hard-drive" or "imaging hard-drive", you'll find mention of widely-used imaging/cloning software including:
"Ghost" from Norton/Symantec
"PartImage" (included on most free linux live-cd's such as knoppix)
"Drive Image/Drive Deploy" from "Powerquest" (now owned by Symantec). All of these products can be used to efficiently clone one pc to another, and/or save an "image" of the hard drive to a set of compressed files. Such files are the best form of backup, especially if/when your hard-drive fails. With those image files and a boot-cd, in typically 20-30 minutes you can do a "bare-metal" restore: that is, starting with a blank, new hard drive, your computer will be restored to the exact state it had when you created the image files. That includes ALL your software, updates, files and settings: everything is back, and bootable. (This is much preferable to re-installing your operating system and all your software from scratch!)
In the example below, we'll backup a C-drive with about 2gig to a set of image files of a size to fit on cd (each image file is 660meg, except the last one which is less). If you have a more likely 20gig used on your c-drive, your image files would likely total about 10gig, taking about 16 cds, or about 4 dvds.
SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
This how-to document describes how use the software Duke folks can obtain from http:// www.oit.duke.edu/site/ You have to get right version for your Windows per below. (To find out which Windows you have, open "My Computer" and do Help: About.)
Vista (This document does NOT apply to Windows Vista)
Windows XP Get "Drive Deploy" ($4). Already on all duke-owned pcs. Windows 2000,ME,98,95,3.1 Get "Drive Image"
If you have a duke-owned box, you may already have above software. Others should download and install the above software. During install, it may prompt you to make 1 or 2 boot diskette(s): if you don't have diskettes or drive, you can skip that step. If you want to make a boot cd, it can be made from the boot diskettes: contact support.
HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS
Any windows pc listed above, and a drive-letter other than C with enough free space. That is, image files cannot be written C-drive: but instead must be written to an external drive (or seperate partition, that is, a drive-letter other than C in "My Computer"). Contact support to
borrow an external drive (or if any questions). To find out how much space will be needed:
1. Right-click on your C-drive, then Properties, for a pie-chart showing how much space is used (figure 1). You can click on "Disk Cleanup" to free up space.
In above example, the C-drive is using 1.8gig, which is the amount we'll backup.
For many modern XP installs, you could easily have 10 or 20 times these numbers, such as C using 20gig in which case you'll need 10gig free on the other drive.
And give the C-drive a short label with the size and type, such as 32GIG-NTFS for a 32gig hard-drive (the type is usually NTFS but could also be FAT32 or even FAT). The example C-drive is labeled "3GIG-NTFS". For a 24gig drive, use 24GIG-NTFS.
2. Repeat step 1 for the other drive (where we'll store image files): it will need to have Free space of at least half the amount we'll backup. In our example, half the amount we'll backup is half of 1.8gig, or 0.9gig (=900 MB). And again label the drive with a name such as
10GIG-FAT32 for a 10gig drive. In our example, the lable is 1GIGFAT-IMG for the partition where image files will be written.
QUICKSTART... Backing up entire C-drive just boils down to steps A-F.
(A.) Start the imaging software, which will notify you that it is going to reboot your pc. (It boots just this one time from a "virtual" floppy or your actual floppy or cd) by any of the following methods.
On duke-owned windows-xp boxes, search for "deploy.exe" ,run it and hit "Reboot Now" button.
If you've installed drive-image or drive-deploy software run it from the Start: Programs: menu, and hit "Reboot Now".
If you have a diskette or cd, you can restart your pc, and hit F12 (or maybe F2 or del) to choose to boot from cd or floppy.
(B.) Your pc should boot to Drive Deploy (or Drive Image) screen, where you see 3 buttons: Create, Restore, and "Disk-to-Disk. (Optionally select Display Drive Info.)
(C.) "Select Source Partitions". (If you are in Drive Info, Hit "Close" to exit back to main menu.). Now hit "Create Image" button, then put a check-mark in box for 1st NTFS partition:
Our example shows a 4gig drive, divided in 2 parts: 3gig-NTFS & 1GIGFAT-IMG. The NTFS partition is the "Source", in other words, what we are going to backup. So it gets the check-mark in box at left. Then hit "Next".
NOTE: If you see a "DellUtility" or any other small partitions before (on top) of the NTFS one, put check mark by those also.
WARNING! Always go by the disk-label(s) when selecting the Source and Desitination. And always Ignore any drive-letters shown in imaging software: drive-c in the imaging software is usuallly NOT drive-c in windows.
(D.) In "Name Image File" window, hit the "Browse" button, to bring up "New Image File" window. At the bottom of the window, in scroll box, select the drive where we'll write the image files by it's label (not Letter).
We selected 10GIGFAT-IMG partition to write those image files to. You'll probably have to scroll down to get to external or other drives. (We tend to prefer to write images to FAT32 rather than NTFS partitions).
Finally type in a simple filename (max of 8-characters, no spaces, ending in ".PQI"),
Again, note that in the example, it shows "C:\2007-05.pqi" but the file is not being written to the C-drive in Windows, but actually to the drive labeled 10GIGFAT-IMG.
(E.) In Compress Image File window, click"High" (smallest image file size). Hit Next, and "Advanced Options", to put check in box of bottom item "Split Image File into Multiple Files" (leave the default File Size, 670,000,000, which is cd-sized).
Do NOT select any of the Verify options... it is better to verify after image is made.
(F.) In "Ready to Create Image File", review the info. Use "Back" if you need to double-check or change anything. Once everything looks ok, hit the "Finish" button to start making the image file(s). Stick around for the first few minutes to make sure it is off to a good start... if problems occur, they tend to show in first few minutes (while checking integrity) . If you
have 10's of gigabytes, it may take a while to finish, especially if writing to an external USB drive.If you get any errors, contact support folks. And, if your display goes to sleep during a long backup, do NOT hit "Enter" key to wake it up, as this may in effect hit the "Cancel" button: it's safer to hit the spacebar or move the mouse
When done, a message saying "Image was copied succesfully to file: xxxxxxx.pqi" stays on screen until you hit ok, taking you back to main menu. If you have time, you can optionally verify the image as follows: select "Restore Image". Browse to navigate and select the PQI file you just created, then hit the Verify button. The verify can take some time also, but not as long as to create the image. Don't do the actual restore right now: you'll only need to do that if your C-drive is bad, windows won't boot etc. Get support before trying a restore. You quit the program with the Exit button. Then reboot (ctrl-al-del) back to windows. In windows, you can burn the image files to cds or dvds. In our example we see a set of files named:
2007-05.PQI 2007-05.002 2007-05.003 2007-05.004
,,, and so on upto the last file, You need ALL of these files, NOT just the .PQI to do a restore. (Also note that there are windows programs named "Image Editor" or "Image Explorer" that let you verify image files, and even extract just certain files or folders (just like a zip file) which is really cool.
HINTS, ADVANCED TOPICS, and TROUBLESHOOTING
PRELIMINARIES. Before making the image, we generally do these 3 steps:
1. download and install TreeSize from http://www.oit.duke.edu/site and use it to find if there are any large files and folders you can safely delete. (Obviously, don't delete anything unless you are 100% sure you don't need it.)
2. Run Disk Cleanup. It runs much quicker if you first run this registry-hack:
3. Start: Run: (type in) CHKDSK (and hit enter). If you see only a few errors, type "CHKDSK /F" and when it asks if you want to check at startup, say "Y (yes). BUT, if you see more than a few errors, contact support and/or do a SMART check of your hard-drive.
RESIZING PARTITON(S)
Once you have a verified backup image of your C-drive, then that is a good time to re-size the partition to free up space for a partition to store image files. This allows you to make a backup-image without an external drive, and later you can copy or move the image files to a safe place, like external drive or burn to cd(s) or dvd(s).
Contact support about resizing C-drive: we use Partition Magic or free ntfsresize: it is important not to change the location of the boot partition.
Using partimage, the destination for image files can be another computer or server file space as well as external drive(s). We often use partimage on a knoppix cd to make a backup of a single-partition drive before we resize and break it into multiple partitions.
