The 03.07.20 at 11:28, Peter Evans wrote:
But if it isn't your first M$ installation and you have a clue, you'll have done something like burnt ZIP files of the good stuff (and some configuration files) onto a CD-R, and will be able to install from there. Not a piece of cake, but not that agonizing either.
I do the windows backup from inside Linux, and it works. First, I have a bootable CD with an image of the windoze C: disk - the image was originally provided by the computer supplier as one executable, retten.exe (I wonder what the word means :-?), and I put that on a bootable CD - that I use to put back the "C:" disk as it came from the shop. Then, from inside linux, I keep a big zip file, made from Linux, of a full backup of C:, which I unzip on top of the previously mentioned image: at this point, I have a clean install with my modifications and additions, in working order, in less that one hour work, being lazy. Instead of using the big zip - or tar.gz - file, I also have a compressed cdrom (zisofs), which is somewhat faster to use, once created. Notice that the backup, being made from Linux, can copy everything, because the windows system isn't running. A full backup like this can not be made from inside windows, it refuses to copy certain "in use" files. There are improvements on the above. With the mtools utilities (Linux) it is possible to read (and write) from Linux the special dos file attributes. I think it is possible to create a file with a list of all modified files, and zip only that (+a). Then "mattrib -P" will record the state of the attributes, saving a script that can be used to recreate them on the vfat partition. You see, Linux can be used to reformat and recover a windows partition fast ;-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson