Backing up an HP Pavilion/MCE computer

[DisabledTrucker]

Not sure if this has been asked and answered before here, but doing a search of HP backup turned up nothing I was looking for. Basically, I want to do a back up of an HP computer so as to have a full DVD of all of the files etc prior to booting it up for the first time, once that is done it seperates the files and puts some on the newly created "C:\Pavilion" partition while leaving the rest on the "D:\Recovery" partition. What I am trying to do is make a full backup of my XPHome/XPMCE so I can add the SP2/2004 upgrade to it prior to installing it, since the only disks I seem to be able to get from HP are multiple CD's with the full backup on it, not the actual disks from M$ with the O/S on it, then all the B.S. extras that they include with the system on seperate CD's, everything is combined. Since it's this way, I was looking at incorporating SP2/2004 upgrade into the "D:\Recovery" partition prior to initial boot so I don't have to do it later everytime I have to "recover" their crappy installs, due to file deletions of unnecessary crap they install on their systems. My final result will be I will replace their crappy software with software of my choice on this DVD with the slipstreamed version of XPSP2/2004 to include on future "recoveries". Though I could attempt to purchase another copy of the operating system, I got screwed by HP by buying their crappy systems and not being given a copy of the actual software on CD's when I purchased the systems. Had I known this at the time, I wouldn't have purchased their crap to begin with, but now I am stuck and need a reasonable solution. I have the disks to replace both the XPhome/MCE editions back on these computers but I want to consolidate them into a DVD with the incorporated SP/software of my choice.

TIA for any assistance that can be given on this subject.

[CoffeeFiend]

Ghost can clone the disk easily (and similar products from different companies). You could clone it to another hard drive or to a mapped drive across your network (you'll need a 98se boot floppy with appropriate ndis2 drivers for your NIC and such). You can poke around the disk image as well with tools like ghost explorer afterwards. If you want a real "recovery" DVD, then you can make a bootdisk with a batchfile that will start ghost and restore the disk from the disk image on it, it's actually pretty straightforward (any help needed don't be afraid to ask).

For the recovery "floppy" you can start with the old 98se boot floppy, and keep just the boot files (plus generic cd drivers, mscdex, ...), add ghost.exe on it (you can actually make it a 2.88mb floppy in tools like winimage if required), then the batchfile looks for the disk image, sets that as a variable, and starts ghost "command line style" to restore disk 1 from the disk image. I've done that many times for people that end up messing their PCs bad all the time and that don't want to have to reinstall/update everything by hand or that don't know how and it works wonders for them.

[DisabledTrucker]

I guess I wasn't clear enough, I don't have a problem accessing it from another computer, I don't want to clone it, as that too wont give me what I am looking for. When I install the 7/8 disk collection to the HDD of the HP computers, and shut them off, pull the drives to put them into another computer to grab the D:\Recovery partition, a lot of the files have already been copied over to C:\Pavilion partition as well. Both of these partitions are using different file systems. Recovery is on some weird screwed up version of fat32 and the Pavilion partition is on NTFS.

Though HP with the MCE gives a way to perform a CD copy of everything, I end up with what I already have, 7/8 CD's with everything backed up. What I am wanting is one single DVD with all the information on it in a single partition (DVD) so I can upgrade it, change the files/drivers, and then use that single DVD to put it back onto the HDD.

It also doesn't solve the other problem I have with accessing these files prior to them being seperated into the different partitions, which is what I am looking for, and need help with. Once I can get that, I can make the DVD and thus should be able to slipstream SP2/2004, along with whatever I want to put in the files/drivers folders, into that and put it back onto the HDD. What your suggesting wont work, as I have already tried it before, with various cloning utilities, (what a waste of money that was!)

From further inspection, they seem to use a Windows PE way of installing the O/S with all it's garbage files, is there a way to seperate what is PE and what is the actual O/S?

**EDIT**

As it's next to impossible to obtain the actual MCE edition, that would be difficult at best to obtain to be able to perform a slipstream of if there's not a way to grab what I need from the HDD or compile the CD's somehow to grab it. And after spending absurd ammounts on these systems, which are supposed to have full versions of the O/S with them on CD, (per M$ rules,) I don't feel as if I should have to fork out another $200 for each copy Home I have, as well, to obtain a copy I can upgrade to SP2 to put back on there.

Since their keys wont work with other "real" versions of OEM XP then I am screwed unless I can get what I need from these installs to perform the upgrades I want. Otherwise I would just borrow a CD with OEM home/MCE on it to get what I want.

Edited September 11, 2004 by DisabledTrucker