RE: Windows registry cleanup tools - PowerQuest Drive Image

[Norman Bauman nbauman@xxxxxxxx]

At 01:43 PM 8/28/06 -0500, Phil White wrote:

Following the advice of some people on this list, I've been using Norton
Ghost 2003. I've been avoiding the later editions, since I've heard they
have problems and less functionality. I installed the Ghost program from
the CD onto my computer, then created a 3 1/2-in FD boot disk, and I run it
from the boot disk.

(New Symantec products have Product Activation, which I hate. I bought the
latest version of SystemWorks, and when I found out it had Product
Activation, I sent it back. Realize that I wanted to get a second copy of
Ghost so I could use it within the license and do everything right.)

>From reputation, the other imaging program that people use reliably is
Acronis True Image, although I haven't used it myself.

>	If the drive is of a newer interface type or larger size than those
>popularly available when Drive Image 7 was being sold you may need to get a
>newer version of it to do the job.
>
>	Symantec bought out PowerQuest about two years ago and more or less
>froze the products, but is still selling some of them. Other parts were
>integrated into Ghost.
>
>	Symantec is MOL what is termed as a "bottom feeder" in the world of
>software. Their game is buying out competitive products and sinking them in
>favor of their own (and often less powerful) products. PowerQuest is/was
>just one more notch in their belt.

I agree with you on that. They bought Ghost, which was a small, simple,
useful program that ran off a floppy disk, and turned it into a big bloated
program that required 50mb hd space, for a useless installation of Active
Update (since there's nothing to update). As a final insult, the on-line
manual was wrong, and I was up until 2am trying to figure it out. (On the
plus side, they now have free tech support when it's their fault; on the
minus side the techies don't always understand how to use the program.)



>	There are several more image copying utilities out there. You may
>want to look at what Alohabob has to offer. Their utilities are not only
>effective and easy to use, you can also tweak the configuration for more or
>less detail if you need to. See: http://www.alohabob.com/

As I understand it, from the NYT reviews and elsewhere, Alohabob is
designed to transfer files from one hard drive to another, but (1) It
doesn't transfer working files of the OS etc. because they wimped out on
copy protection (2) you're only supposed to use it once to transfer one
installation.

>>The obvious solution to data and OS backups, including backing up the reg
>>is this: make an IMAGE of the whole kit and caboodle, OS, apps,
>>data--regardless whether they are on the same or different partitions.
>>Once you have a clean-running system, deposit the image on an external HD.

>So the next best thing is just to XCOPY everything from C: to the external.
>No point in using Drive Image if it's not going to accomplish more
>"recovery" than XCOPY.
>
>So I have a .BAT file I run from DOS, the essence of which is the line:
>
>xcopy c:\*.* /c /e /f /d /y %backup_drive:\
>
>The variable, %backup_drive, holds the (changeable) drive letter of the
>external drive; it is user input earlier in the .BAT file. The switches
>back up only files with a newer date--and, via the /e switch, keep the copy
>going past errors (uncopyable files that Windows' Copy facility stops at).

Thanks for the batch file line. I'll try it.

But did you ever think of using the freeware program xxcopy, which copies
all the Windows files? If I recall correctly, I copied a Win98 installation
to a hard drive partition, copied it back to an empty hard drive, and it
booted.

Of course, the reason xcopy doesn't copy those uncopyable files is that
those files are running as part of Windows and you can't copy a file while
it's running. In other words, an OS can't copy itself.

Norman

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Norman Bauman
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