Stuart Noble wrote:

Interested to know what people think about recovery disks.

In general - Evil b*stard things...

Some are better than others - but some are downright evil.

sorted out a friend's Dixons PC, which was infected with all manner of
nasties. Put My Documents on to a cdrw, booted from the Dixons recovery
CD and the whole thing was running sweetly within the hour. Doing that
periodically seems like a simple maintenance schedule for any level of
user.

However if you were a user who had convinced they needed to do a repair
install of windows and had not realised that the recovery CD would vape
the complete machine and all your data, you could be a bit miffed!

So, how easy would it be to create a bootable CD for a home made
machine? I rather fancy a bit of colonic irrigation

Easy enough. You can create a slipstreamed windows install CD if you
want that includes all the updates and drivers for your PC. However if
you just want a fast recovery to a known state then either look at an
imaging product like Ghost - that will let you image a drive to a file
and then later recreate the drive state from the image in a matter of
mins. Alternatively look at one of the virtual PC solutions. Lets you
create a complete virtual PC running in its own sandbox that you can
simply restart to be back to a default state.

If you want a boot CD that will let you tinker with the remenents of a
crashed windows box then I find the "Bart PE" bootable CD quite handy.
Lets you boot from a CD, get a network up and running and run a file
manager utility with full disk access - way better than the MS recovery
console.


--
Cheers,

John.

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