The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

System Restoration Disks

Has anybody worked on creating system restoration disks - any ideas on what are good tools and technologies ?

KS
Thursday, February 19, 2004

Maybe not what you are looking for but Slashdot had an article some time ago about "Live Windows Bootable CDs for Sysadmins"

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/15/0251249&mode=thread

I am a Linux user and have never used BartPE. Hope the pointer helps anyway.

Fredrik Svensson
Thursday, February 19, 2004

I don't know of any technologies for them... but I do have a few opinions about them...

Kyralessa
Thursday, February 19, 2004

What a pessimist I am. You're surely doing them for a big company with oodles of desktops that needs such things, and not to inflict them on hapless consumers.

If you'll excuse me, I'm off to go see a psychologist.

Kyralessa
Thursday, February 19, 2004

Kyraleesa, I really did not understand what you are saying. Are you being cynical???

KS
Thursday, February 19, 2004

When I saw "system restoration disks" my kneejerk reaction (or remove the word "knee" if you prefer) was to think you meant things like those crappy CDs that come with Compaq or HP PCs, which I especially loathe because I had to deal with them back in my PC tech days.

But after hitting "Post Message" (which unfortunately is usually when I do my deeper thinking) I realized that's probably not the context within which you were speaking.

Kyralessa
Thursday, February 19, 2004

Not sure if this is what you mean but it looks useful to me:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

sgf
Thursday, February 19, 2004

Any form of disk clonng software will do the trick.

Ghost is considered the best and most reliable, but if you are going to be giving out a disk, then just choose the one you can get the best deal on.

And please, even if you are cloning the whole disk, MAKE IT A PARTITION CLONE. There's nothing worse than to reparitition your disk so that all your data is on a second partition, and then find that the restore disk wipes it out all the same!

Stephen Jones
Thursday, February 19, 2004