[JohnnieF]

OK, I can't believe this is happening. I have just done a backup and decided to test it by installing the backup on another drive and booting to it. It would not boot into windows. I do regular backups but have never had to restore one. I have been awefully lucky. So I grabbed one of my older backups and restored it to the same drive after wiping it. It will not boot either. In both cases if I boot to windows with my old drive and look at this drive all of the files are on the drive. The partition is primary and active.

I am using windows backup utility to create the backups and restore them. With other operating systems I could just transfer the system files to the partition (SYS) and it would be fine. But I can't find any way of doing this with XP. I tried the XP recovery console "FIXBOOT" but that did not work. I also read some where about using a floppy but I have no floppy drives, just a DVD that is bootable (P4 3 Gig).

Can someone tell me how to make these backups bootable.

Thanks
Johnnie

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XP Backup is realistically only good for system data and what not. It's no good for copying the entire state of a drive.
What you really want is something like Norton Ghost. With this you can clone the entire drive from outside Windows to a Ghost file (on another disk for example), then if your main one falls over, replace it and Ghost it back.

With regards to SYS, those are DOS commands that only apply to Windows 95, 98 and ME. They have no relevance in XP or later.

[Neil Jones]

XP Backup is realistically only good for system data and what not. It's no good for copying the entire state of a drive.
What you really want is something like Norton Ghost. With this you can clone the entire drive from outside Windows to a Ghost file (on another disk for example), then if your main one falls over, replace it and Ghost it back.

With regards to SYS, those are DOS commands that only apply to Windows 95, 98 and ME. They have no relevance in XP or later.