I am trying to make a image of my hard drive with Vista Ultima installed and everything I have added since then, and want to burn it to a dvd so if it crashes I can reload it, I have tried reading some of the posts but they are out of my realm of understanding at the stage I am at:

Any easy to understand instructions would be greatly appreciated.

I have downloaded OSCDIMAGE and VLITE

Is it possible to do what I am asking? I do not want to do a unattended install, just a safe gard if something goes wrong

Edited March 18, 200719 yr by newtech

Get either Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost and create an image of your partition which you can later burn onto a DVD or save onto an external HDD.

Perhaps you may want to look at the recovery image option within your version of Vista as mentioned here.

newtech,

Use MS's imagex program to capture an image of your hard drive. This will create a .wim image file. Once captured, you can place the image on a DVD, network share, etc. You can then use imagex at a later date to /apply the image back to the device.

The oscdimg tool you mentioned is used to create bootable iso files that can be burnt onto a DVD or CD.

Shawn

Use MS's imagex program to capture an image of your hard drive. This will create a .wim image file. Once captured, you can place the image on a DVD, network share, etc. You can then use imagex at a later date to /apply the image back to the device.

The oscdimg tool you mentioned is used to create bootable iso files that can be burnt onto a DVD or CD.

This is the best method,

Norton Ghost does not like VISTA I have found and I have not tried Acronis. An imagex capture of a sysprepped image that has been genralised and then backing it up to a network share or using the oscdimg tool is the MS preffered methods of doing this.

Gwido

whats difference between capturing harddrive using imagex and using acronis? I use acronis but its only copy of a installed vista, what benefits imagex has?