On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 02:13:38PM -0500, Andy Zbikowski (Zibby) wrote: > > On the other hand, I got tired of reinstalling Windows when it failed. So, > I sat myself down one night and reinstalled it, got all the current > patches and drivers installed, rebooted to linux, and burned the fresh > windows install to a cd-rom. Next time windows crashes I just format the > windows drive and cp -R /mnt/cdrom/* /mnt/win and Windows is good to go > again. Won't work. You have to have at least a couple of files (think of io.sys and msdos.sys) at the beginning of the drive. Use dd to create a bit-idetical copy. My recipe is as follows: - make a 1G partition for windows (C:) - install windows/drivers/utilities/whatever - boot linux - mount the c partition, cd into it - dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofile bs=32M - rm zerofile - [the last two steps filled with zero all unused blocks] - umount the c partition - dd if=/dev/whaterver bs=32M | gzip > win.YYYYMMDD.img.gz - burn it on a cd > For my home system, that backup system is enough for me. yep. with /home and /etc backed up, no problems. florin -- "you have moved your mouse, please reboot to make this change take effect"