[orian22]

Hi,

I’ve made an ISO image of my hard drive and put it on an external HDD. I was going to make a boot disk using a program called Drive Cloner, which requires me to include the ISO image on the boot disk, but the ISO image size is 7 GB, when compressed, and I can’t find any DVD-RW that size—the largest is 4 GB.

Someone told me that I don’t need to make a boot disk if I have the image on an external HDD because if I did need to reinstall my operating system (once reinstalled) I could just copy the image from the external HDD to my PC. I don’t know how to do this to restore my PC to the way it is in the ISO image, though.

Any advice?

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Hi orian22 and

Lets see if I can explain images and cloning to you.

First of all you state you have an iso image. We generally do not referance a hard drive image as a "iso image". It is generally just an image. An image that is a iso image will have the extension of .iso.

You can take a image of the drive or clone the drive.
A image can be saved on CD, DVD, or hard drive. It can be moved from 1 to the other with out a problem.
You can make multiple images of the drive.
You can then restore the drive.

A clone of the drive is an exact copy of the drive on to another hard drive. When needed you would just swap the drive. This is sometimes easier, but you have a hard drive that you can not doing anything else with.

When you image the drive you need an imaging program Such as Drive Image, Easeus ToDo Backup, Ghost, or any others.
To restore the image you would need to boot from a CD that has the imaging program on it.
In other words, if you used ghost to create the image, you would need a ghost bootable CD so that ghost could restore the image.
The imaging programs will not restore someone elses image. They are specific to themselves.

I use Norton Ghost 2003 (old version), but it works for my needs on some old company Arcom computers with NT.
I also use Easeus ToDoBackup. It is really simple. As of yet it does not have a option for bootable CD, so I have integrated it into a Barts PE builder Cd.

I have also experimented with Drive Image and it works quite well. I have that integrated into Barts PE also.

With Barts PE I can boot the computer, start the Easeus ToDo backup, locate my image, then restore it.

What program did you use to get the image?

123runner

[123Runner]

Hi orian22 and

Lets see if I can explain images and cloning to you.

First of all you state you have an iso image. We generally do not referance a hard drive image as a "iso image". It is generally just an image. An image that is a iso image will have the extension of .iso.

You can take a image of the drive or clone the drive.
A image can be saved on CD, DVD, or hard drive. It can be moved from 1 to the other with out a problem.
You can make multiple images of the drive.
You can then restore the drive.

A clone of the drive is an exact copy of the drive on to another hard drive. When needed you would just swap the drive. This is sometimes easier, but you have a hard drive that you can not doing anything else with.

When you image the drive you need an imaging program Such as Drive Image, Easeus ToDo Backup, Ghost, or any others.
To restore the image you would need to boot from a CD that has the imaging program on it.
In other words, if you used ghost to create the image, you would need a ghost bootable CD so that ghost could restore the image.
The imaging programs will not restore someone elses image. They are specific to themselves.

I use Norton Ghost 2003 (old version), but it works for my needs on some old company Arcom computers with NT.
I also use Easeus ToDoBackup. It is really simple. As of yet it does not have a option for bootable CD, so I have integrated it into a Barts PE builder Cd.

I have also experimented with Drive Image and it works quite well. I have that integrated into Barts PE also.

With Barts PE I can boot the computer, start the Easeus ToDo backup, locate my image, then restore it.

What program did you use to get the image?

123runner

[orian22]

Thanks 123Runner

I used Drive Cloner to do the image.

It has a facility to do a bootable CD, but to boot using the image requires the image to be put on the CD/DVD, but I can't do this as the image is too large for a standard 4 GB DVD. So a bootable CD is no good for me. That's why I as was asking if what I heard about restoring the image using an external HDD was really possible. The guy at the PC shop said it was. But I don't see how, given that you can't boot from an external hard drive--or can you?

[123Runner]

Booting from the image will not work.
You can boot memtest86 which is an image.
You can boot a hard drive diagnostic program as an image.
But you can't boot your entire hard drive image.

I suspect that if Drive cloner allows you to create a bootable Cd, then you would boot off the CD into its program and then navigate to where your image is saved.

I need to look in to drive clone and see what it says.
Be back soon.

[123Runner]

I had to install the trial to get the help file.

Go to the help file and read up on backups and restores.
For backups, you need a full first, then you can do incremental or differential.

For restore when you have a hard drive crash, you will need a bootable cd.
You create that cd through 1 of the programs that was installed when you installed the "drive cloner" software. It is called "recovery media builder".

When the drive crashes you boot from the CD. The program runs, you select the image/ partition and go from there.
The help file is very easy to follow.

The help file suggests you put a copy of the image on the bootable CD. This I believe is so you have the boot CD that is needed and the image together all on 1 CD. You could put the boot CD on 1 CD and the image on the other CD. You can have the boot CD and then the image on your external. It does not matter.
You do need the boot CD if you have a hard drive crash and need to recover.

I suspect that you need to save the "full" image and use that for the recovery because the incrementals are changes to the "full" since the full was made.

123runner

[orian22]

Thanks for the trouble you’ve gone to.

I’ll probably have to leave the boot CD and the image (which is currently on my external drive) separate from each other because for some reason the Recovery Media Builder won’t let me copy the image on to the DVD I’m using because it says the image is too large for it (despite the program having compressed the image to its fullest extent). I’m using a 4 GB DVD, and the image is 6 GB. Apparently, 4 GB is the largest DVD-RW size--unless there are larger ones I'm unaware of.

Anyway, I appreciate the time you’ve taken to help me.