John Rumm wrote:
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.



Isn't there some utility with a big numpty button saying, "create
bootable cd" to include OS, installed updates, address book, mail
folders and my docs? Slipstreaming and the rest are all too complicated
for the type of user that would benefit most.