Is Making A Recovery Disk Really That Important?

Author: ChrisDanes

2008-09-24 Word Count: 511 Category: Software

A Boot Disk is one of the most important tools that you must have if you a poses computer. When you buy a PC from the computer store it is fully installed with an OS, in most cases Windows. It comes accompanied with a Failure Disk which allows you to restore your original Windows OS in the event of a fatal error.

Operating Systems like Windows become very slow with time. Just the usage of the computer like internet browsing, can corrupt your registries by letting to certain sites install players, plug-ins and software. If they are not installed you can’t surf, so you don’t have a choice. There are so many computer programs these days that you must install on a fresh installed Windows OS to benefit from it, not to speak of device drivers, windows updates and patches, that a reinstallation of Windows with all you need can take a long time, at least a few hours. Not to speak of specific settings and profile settings which you need day by day.

That’s why you must have a recovery solution, a sort of restoration of your Operating System. This will save your time and energy of a new Windows installation. You can have all your data and all your configuration restored at the date when you installed your system. And this does not imply advanced computer knowledge or risky maneuvers. Another advantage is that it can be performed on all Windows platforms (95, 96, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, NT).

There is specialized software for this operation like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. They are both simple, fast, effective and no cost. How they work? They do a copy of your desired hard drive partition, in our case C:\ partition (if we suppose that Windows is installed on C:\). This is an image with all the files contained on that system partition: Windows Operating System, profile files, device drivers and installed programs. All files are copied on that ghost image. So, it’s better to fully install Windows with all its drivers, service packs if there are any, network configuration, programs that you need and specific user settings. Just before you make a clone of your Operating System I recommend you to use the PC for a while, until you have the complete installation and configuration you need day by day.

After that just install Norton Ghost or Acronis. Follow the instructions (they are accompanied with good friendly helps and tutorials) for creating a boot floppy disk or CD/DVD. Boot from them and do the copy of your Windows disk partition to an image file to another disk partition. Reboot Windows from hard disk and copy that image in a DVD (or somewhere safe).

After a while, when your Windows installation has problems, it will be slow, having problems and errors at boot time, you just boot with the floppy/CD Norton Ghost disk and you select to restore your saved image file of the OS which contains the Windows operating system itself.

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