the easiest way to back it up is to take an image of the entire hard drive.
You mean, say, just via XCOPY? So far for my
boot partitions (on one hard drive,
C: is an old Windows 2000 installation;
D: and E: are Windows XP installations;
and my usual boot partition is E:) I have
NTBACKUP of E: on I: on a separate hard disk.
I have successfully restored an NTBACKUP
of a boot partition back to the same drive
letter and boot partition and had a
good running system. Yes, NTBACKUP can
backup a live system, but what's really
involved in backup and recovery of a
boot partition, especially master boot records,
I don't know.
No, not xcopy. By the time you run xcopy, Windows has already booted. It's too late.
My suggestion was to use the 'dd' Unix command (outside of Windows, of course) to back up the raw 0s and 1s on the disk, so that it doesn't matter what kind of OS you have or what kind of paritions you have. It's a very powerful method that lets you make a verbatim copy of every single bit on the hard drive, but of course that also makes it easier to fuck up something.
On my system, especially considering the EOL of XP,
the main issue is just backing up a 'boot partition',
that is, a hard disk partition that is bootable, that
has the usual XP directory tree, and that otherwise has
as little as possible. For everything other than
a boot partition, I have a workable system based on
WinZip and DVDs. A 3TB external hard disk with some
suitable software, maybe just XCOPY, would be better.
Since I have two XP bootable partitions, I could boot one
of the two and get a backup of the other, bit for bit,
if I could find or write a utility such as the one you
mentioned for Unix.
But, then, much of this backup interest is recovering
after a hard drive failure, and if I replace a hard
drive then the new one will no doubt have to be larger
than the old one in which case I wonder if the bit for bit, or record for record, copy I have would boot if copied to the new drive.
That NTBACKUP will backup a live system is convenient but not essential. What is important about NTBACKUP for me
is that, finally, I got it to work, all the way, from
backup to restore.
I also have a copy of Acronis which likely I should
unwrap, study, work with, and use.
Comments
You mean, say, just via XCOPY? So far for my boot partitions (on one hard drive, C: is an old Windows 2000 installation; D: and E: are Windows XP installations; and my usual boot partition is E:) I have NTBACKUP of E: on I: on a separate hard disk. I have successfully restored an NTBACKUP of a boot partition back to the same drive letter and boot partition and had a good running system. Yes, NTBACKUP can backup a live system, but what's really involved in backup and recovery of a boot partition, especially master boot records, I don't know.
No, not xcopy. By the time you run xcopy, Windows has already booted. It's too late.
My suggestion was to use the 'dd' Unix command (outside of Windows, of course) to back up the raw 0s and 1s on the disk, so that it doesn't matter what kind of OS you have or what kind of paritions you have. It's a very powerful method that lets you make a verbatim copy of every single bit on the hard drive, but of course that also makes it easier to fuck up something.
Thanks for the clarification.
On my system, especially considering the EOL of XP, the main issue is just backing up a 'boot partition', that is, a hard disk partition that is bootable, that has the usual XP directory tree, and that otherwise has as little as possible. For everything other than a boot partition, I have a workable system based on WinZip and DVDs. A 3TB external hard disk with some suitable software, maybe just XCOPY, would be better.
Since I have two XP bootable partitions, I could boot one of the two and get a backup of the other, bit for bit, if I could find or write a utility such as the one you mentioned for Unix.
But, then, much of this backup interest is recovering after a hard drive failure, and if I replace a hard drive then the new one will no doubt have to be larger than the old one in which case I wonder if the bit for bit, or record for record, copy I have would boot if copied to the new drive.
That NTBACKUP will backup a live system is convenient but not essential. What is important about NTBACKUP for me is that, finally, I got it to work, all the way, from backup to restore.
I also have a copy of Acronis which likely I should unwrap, study, work with, and use.