Turn Vista Home Premium Into Ultimate - (Part 1) Disk Imaging
One of the features in Vista Ultimate is Complete PC Backup and Restore. This allows for easier system backup of your hard disk, essentially making a clone or image of the current state of the hard drive. This feature is available in Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions of Vista.
Complete PC Backup and Restore should not be confused with Automatic Backup which only backup up files and settings. Auto backup is available on all versions of Vista except for Home Basic.
Today we will look at one option to create an image of a hard drive with Vista Home Premium using the free utility DriveImage XML. **These Screenshots were taken on an XP machine … the application works the same for both Vista and XP**
DriveImage XML allows you to back up files and complete disk images into an XML file which you can use to restore the copy later.
The application is extremely easy to use. Just follow through the steps with the Drive Backup Wizard.
It is as easy as finding the drive you want to back up and deciding where to back up the XML image to. DriveImage XML even allows you to back up the disc while you are still using it.
Progress of the back up is shown by sector.
Additional features include disk to disk backup and you can use Task Scheduler to automate the process for you. Backing up to a network drive is also available. DriveImage XML is free and is a superb disk imaging solution to add to Vista Home Premium. This application also works with Windows XP.
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This is in deed a great program (DriveImage XML) - but: try how long it takes to restore a partition of about 15 - 20 GBs.
I wonder how long your computer takes. (Dual Core Intel 6300, ASUS Mainboard P5LD2, 2GB DDRam)
IDE and SATA RAID
Thanks. Very helpfull
what happened to the rest of this series?
@ Landon, coming very soon!
What about when your system crashes? What is needed to restore the image on your new HD? According to the documentation, they do not provide a reboot disk and I am struggling trying to figure out what I need to put on a BartPE or even a WinPe disc if I can. I'm reading all that I can in the time I have but any help with be great! Thanks.
I'm a big fan of Self Image.. In addition to the standalone program, its included on several of the big live cds like UBCD4WIN
@DMC– I used BartPE to do a system restore with driveimage xml. They offer a free version on their site that works on boot cds/usb drives and it was very easy to do the restore.
This is all good and cool that you can extract your vista backup to xml files, but the DriveImageXML support files specifically state they don't provide support for vista, great to know before you make it your only backup image in a pinch.
So, now that I've had to restore my system (thanks to an unrecoverable BSOD), and all I have for backups are these wonderful xml files and BartsPE requires an XP disk (not Vista, again no support)…how am I supposed to re-image my computer with the only backup I have being the DriveImageXML XML files?
-M
I upgraded from Vista Home Premium 64 to Vista Ultimate 32. I had Product codes from my old machine for VU but lost them. Now the trial has expired and Microsoft support has been useless. How can I go back to the VHP 64?
Thanks,
Kevin
Acronis True Image is the way to go. Fast, cheap, different compression levels to save space, also partial, differential, or just recently changed files. Will also explore image and just reinstall selected files if desired.-my Drive Iage back up took up a whole partition, the Adonis iso-under 10 gb.
Hot tip: download the Maxtor "Maxblast5 power tools, or Seagates Disc helper Utilities [same company now]–a basic version [which I use regularly] of True Image is included- and it's FREE!!