rescue cd

[spacesurfer]

That's what I use VMware for...

I've never tried VMware. I've tried MS Virtual Machine and abandoned it. Maybe it does have some utility that I've never explored.

Everyone has their own methods. I just think that a backup solution shouldn't be used to solve malware problems. It's like using a hammer to put in a screw. It'll work, but it's not what the hammer was meant for.

Yeah, I guess you're right. Everyone has their own methods. You're absolutely right about losing customizations made after image creation. Certain programs do let you back up customizations. My favorite is True Launch Bar which lets you do just that. I'm able to check my Hotmail on Outlook so they are all backed up on Hotmail. My configuration isn't too complex or I don't change settings enough that I'll lose a whole lot by reverting to a previous state.

Anyways, my favorite rescue disk will be the ghost floppy until floppies disappear from the face of the earth. LOL.

[spacesurfer]

I ended up making the UBCD to give it a shot.

This is a very nice boot CD in that I can surf the net and acess the network machines on PCs that I can install the NIC card.

However, several problems I faced: 1) I don't know how to see my hard drives (can you or can you not see your hard drives?).

2) If your NIC card is not supported, how do you install that card? Seems the drivers don't work.

3) I couldn't run Norton Ghost.

Considering these I don't have a reason to use other than that the interface is nice.

[Zxian]

1) Do you have SATA hard drives? Standard PATA hard drives should be visible in the file manager (A43 - I can't remember which is on UBCD).

2) What NIC do you have? Any NIC that is detected by the Windows that you used to build UBCD should be operational.

3) Did you get a specific error message? Also, doesn't Norton Ghost have its own recovery CD?

[pmshah]

I have not had a floppy drive in my PC for over 3 years now. Under win98 dos I used to use a utility called TI which would emulate a floppy drive flawlessly. Under XP I use a utility called vfdwin. It is a win32 version of virtual floppy which works for most of the boot floppy creating applications.

For Ghost I simply use a standard win98 boot image, add cd drivers & point to ghost directory to do start ghost. Works very well. In fact quite often I use this conveniently to install OS also.

[Andromeda43]

If you live in New York and you want to make a trip to Los Angeles, it's pretty hard to start in Cleveland, Oh.

It's all about planning. (putting a 3.5" floppy drive in your computer is just good planning...it gives you so many more options and control over your PC.)

Up untill June of this year, I was still building custom made PC's for my customers. I've never built a PC without a floppy drive. (and never will) Even if those customers never use the FD,,,,,I will.

The best rescue CD is one made with a program like Ghost 2003 which not only puts an exact image of your C: drive on the disk, but the info from the boot floppy as well, as the boot sector for the CD. What you wind up with is a CD or DVD that can boot up your system with a brand new hard drive in it, or an old one that you may have had to re-format and then restore everything from your old HD. You never loose a single bit of information.

I've been using this system for several years and setting up like systems for my customers.

I have one customer who runs three corporations from his office PC. Every afternoon at about 5PM he makes a Ghost image of his entire C: drive. It's dirt cheap insurance against disaster.

His 100% disaster insurance costs him about twenty cents a day.

My own Ghost images no longer fit on a CD so I'm now using DVD's. I do keep my C: drive as clean as possible so a Ghost image will fit on a single DVD.

During the backup process, Ghost offers to use my Boot Floppy as the boot image on the DVD. I always say "Yes" to the offer and wind up with a bootable recovery disk.

I just can't think of anything any simpler than that and with my new SATA drive, my backups are done in very short order. Doing a Ghost backup and putting the image file on the second partition of my SATA drive takes only three (3) minutes.

If you only have a CD burner and not a DVD burner, Ghost will span as many CD's as needed to create it's image file.

Considering the now very low cost of Norton's Ghost 2003, there's no reason why anyone should not have a copy for their own use. At least half of the cries for help that we see in these on-line forums could be totally eliminated if people would just start doing weekly backups.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Andromeda43

[spacesurfer]

No, I have standard PATA hard drive connected to the RAID port. (I have two RAID and two IDE; have CD/DVD ROMs on the IDE ports and hard drive on RAID port).

The NIC is built into the motherboard. It's a Marvel Yuvok 1 gbit that's on ASUS P5gdc mobo.

No specific error message, other than no NIC found and my hdd simply don't show up in explorer.

Yup, Ghost has it's own recovery CD, but was wondering how I can make use of the UBCD. So far, it just takes a long time to load. Once it loads, since I can't load NIC card, I can't browse internet... or do nothing.

On my second machine, the NIC is found but same for HDD--it's on a RAID port so it's not recognized... at least I can get on internet from that machine!!

1) Do you have SATA hard drives? Standard PATA hard drives should be visible in the file manager (A43 - I can't remember which is on UBCD).

2) What NIC do you have? Any NIC that is detected by the Windows that you used to build UBCD should be operational.

3) Did you get a specific error message? Also, doesn't Norton Ghost have its own recovery CD?

[Zxian]

The thing about the UBCD and hardware is that anything that Windows doesn't detect on its own won't show up in UBCD. If you need to install third party drivers for your NIC (from ASUS) to get it to work, then you'll need to integrate those drivers into the source for your UBCD. Same goes for the RAID controller.

[spacesurfer]

I see! I will try that. Although I don't know how yet, I'm sure there's probably a tutorial here somewhere on this site.

You changed your Avatar, no?

The thing about the UBCD and hardware is that anything that Windows doesn't detect on its own won't show up in UBCD. If you need to install third party drivers for your NIC (from ASUS) to get it to work, then you'll need to integrate those drivers into the source for your UBCD. Same goes for the RAID controller.

[Zxian]

I see! I will try that. Although I don't know how yet, I'm sure there's probably a tutorial here somewhere on this site.

You changed your Avatar, no?

The thing about the UBCD and hardware is that anything that Windows doesn't detect on its own won't show up in UBCD. If you need to install third party drivers for your NIC (from ASUS) to get it to work, then you'll need to integrate those drivers into the source for your UBCD. Same goes for the RAID controller.

There are tutorials on how to integrate drivers. nLite can do this for you with certain drivers. Otherwise look at any forums/topics that deal with Bâshrat the Sneaky.

And yes... I changed my avatar. Naruto (my new favorite anime show) is getting really interesting.

[spacesurfer]

I finally integrated my NIC card driver (Yukon Marvell) to the WinXP CD. I also integrated drivers for the RAID HDD. However, my HDD is still not recognized. I was able to browse the internet because the NIC card driver loaded correctly.

There are tutorials on how to integrate drivers. nLite can do this for you with certain drivers. Otherwise look at any forums/topics that deal with Bâshrat the Sneaky.

And yes... I changed my avatar. Naruto (my new favorite anime show) is getting really interesting.