Backups - Part 1

I use two forms of backups; data and system. As such, the backups are performed different ways and actually stored in different physical locations. Part 1 of this series deals with backing up your system - generally drive C: for most Windows users. Part 2 will cover backing up your pictures, music, and video.

For system backups, or “images” as they’re commonly called, there’s a free utility called DriveImage XML that will make an image of any Fat32/NTFS partitions you have and runs right from within Windows (XP or Vista). DriveImage XML is the free alternative to the commercial products Ghost and True Image. As with it’s commercial counterparts, DriveImage XML’s GUI is useful for making an image when necessary, or browsing the contents of a previously made image, however the ability to call it from the command line is where it’s additional power comes in.

By putting together a simple batch file and scheduling it via Windows Task Scheduler, your system can automatically make images (backups) of itself on a recurring basis. I configure the batch file for my home PC’s to make an image each morning at 2am, and to keep the newest 3 images. This allows me to restore either the entire partition or individual files from this morning, yesterday morning, or the morning before.

To do this, download DriveImage XML either from their site or my freeware site http://www.MissingBytes.net and install it. Next, create an empty text file, name it “Backup Drive C.bat”, and save it somewhere (root of C: is fine for this) and paste the following text in it:

del E:\Images\Older_C.dat
del E:\Images\Older_C.xml

rename E:\Images\Old_C.dat Older_C.dat
rename E:\Images\Old_C.xml Older_C.xml

rename E:\Images\Drive_C.dat Old_C.dat
rename E:\Images\Drive_C.xml Old_C.xml

“C:\Program Files\Runtime Software\DriveImage XML\dixml.exe” /bc /tE:\Images\Drive_C /r- /s- /c /v

Double clicking that batch file will startup DriveImage XML and make an image of your C: partition. It’ll need to create the image on a different drive letter than C:, and the script is setup to create it in E:\Images. If you don’t have E: or would prefer to write yours to say D:, just replace each E: with D: and you’re all set.

There are two types of restores available; file, and system. Restoring files is as easy as opening DriveImage XML, clicking the Browse button, and locating a previously made backup image. Once the image is opened, you’ll see a familiar directory tree displaying your files and folders and can restore whatever you need to.

System restores are a little more involved, but still much easier and faster than reinstalling everything from scratch. A typical restore of 22G of data takes me less than 30 minutes. Installing and patching Windows XP takes much longer than that and that doesn’t even take into account how long it takes to get all of the other applications setup and going again.

Restoring your system can’t be done within Windows the way a backup can. To restore your Windows partition, you need to boot into something else and perform the restore from there. The “something else” I use is a BartPE disk. A BartPE (or Pre-installation Environment) disk is basically a Windows liveCD. You put it in the computer, boot to it, and you’re in a basic, limited version of Windows. From there, you can start DriveImage XML and perform your restore.

BartPE disks support plugins, which are just additional applications bundled onto the CD. I typically add both DriveImage XML and Firefox to my BartPE disks. That way I can still surf while restoring an image. :)
There’s a lot of information on the BartPE site about creating your own BartPE disk, but here are the basics:

  • Download and install BartPE (the application you’ll create your disk with) from here
  • Get your original Windows CD ready, this is what your BartPE disk will be created from
  • Download Windows XP Service Pack 2
  • Download the DriveImageXML BartPE plugin
  • Run BartPE
  • Follow the getting started instructions
  • Create a slipstreamed copy of your Windows XP files - go here and look at the instructions for “I cannot build, my Windows XP installation CD is original (pre-SP1).”
  • Be sure to include the DriveImage XML plugin before building your new BartPE CD

That’s it. I know it looks/sounds complicated, but it really isn’t that bad. And, once it’s made, it’s going to save you a ton of time at some point. Using it is as simple as booting to it and running DriveImage XML from it. If there are other utilities you’d like to include on your BartPE CD, be sure to look over their plugins page to see if a plugin has already been created that does what you want to do.

Some additional points to consider with regards to your backups…

  • Before doing a restore, take the time to do one last backup. When that’s done, do your restore, and if you forgot to make a quick copy of anything (emails, favorites, etc.) simply open the backup you just made and restore those files.
  • After patching a new install of Windows, create an image. If you ever decide you want to do a full reinstall, you can use that one to save the time of installing and patching windows all over again. I typically do this after activating Windows so they don’t think I’m installing it to 20 different PC’s.
  • Periodically (once a week or so) copy your newest image to another PC or burn it to disk. This way if something totally wreaks havoc with your entire PC, you aren’t going to lose your backups in addition to your operating system and user data.

Continue to Backups - Part 2

57 Comments

  1. Runtime’s Data Recovery Blog » Blog Archive » DriveImage XML said,

    April 9, 2007 at 5:32 pm

    [...] http://frozenpixels.wordpress.com/backups-part-1/(another user’s tutorial) [...]

  2. George McNillian said,

    April 26, 2007 at 5:18 pm

    DriveImage XML’s website says you can selectively restore files from the drive image it creates. If that is the case, why do you need the secondary ‘file’ backup outlined in your backup part 2? Couldn’t you simply make sure one copy of the drive image is located off-site?

  3. Bill Minton said,

    April 26, 2007 at 6:15 pm

    Good question. It does let you browse the backups and extract individual files very easily. I do file backups separately because they are on different drives/partitions, etc. that I may not want to make images of due to sheer size.

    For instance, my data drive on my main PC has some things I want backed up (password file, documents, etc.), but a lot of other stuff I don’t (downloaded applications I want to install/test, etc.).

  4. Dave said,

    May 2, 2007 at 10:45 pm

    I really like the batch file idea from above. I was wondering if anyone was aware of any error numbers that the command line may return. i.e. it returns something other than 0 of the backup process failed for some reason. I was hoping to use this as a switch on whether or not to delete the oldest backup.

  5. airjrdn said,

    May 3, 2007 at 12:59 am

    I’m not sure. I’m no batch guru though. I know the scheduled job will indicate if it runs into a problem, but it’s possible the batch would encounter one that the scheduler was unaware of.

    I’m pretty sure my wife’s laptop has ran out of disk space on the drive it was writing the image to and when we went to use the laptop DXML was still up and displaying an error. That doesn’t help with automating things much better though.

    VBScript may be another option, but it would be more involved than the simple batch file above.

  6. Jay Miller said,

    July 28, 2007 at 9:04 pm

    What do we do with all the extra files dixml.exe creates?

    Example= Drive_C.001 all the way in sequence thru to Drive_C.014

    Regards
    Jay

  7. airjrdn said,

    July 30, 2007 at 11:11 am

    Using the switches I’ve outlined in the article, there should be no file splitting, so you shouldn’t have a .001, .002, etc. set of files.

  8. Bruce said,

    July 31, 2007 at 11:09 pm

    I have the same file splitting condition; I think it’s probably because my external drive where I’m writing the backups is FAT32 instead of NTFS. I’m hoping to move up to a Mac in the near future so I need the FAT drive to be readable by both Windows and MacOS.

    To make the scheduled task .bat file usable with the .001, .002, etc files in place, I created sub-directories in my target named DriveC, DriveC_Old and DriveC_Older. The .bat file looks like this:

    rmdir /s /q F:\Images\DriveC_Older

    rename F:\Images\DriveC_Old DriveC_Older
    rename F:\Images\DriveC DriveC_Old
    mkdir F:\Images\DriveC

    start “C:\Program Files\Runtime Software\DriveImage XML\dixml.exe” /bC /tF:\Images\DriveC\DriveC /s /c /v

    Hope this helps.

  9. airjrdn said,

    August 1, 2007 at 1:50 am

    Good point, I didn’t think about FAT/FAT32 having the size limitation.

  10. Bruce said,

    August 1, 2007 at 11:22 am

    Oops! I had to remove “start” from the final line in my .bat file. I thought that would run the backup in the background but it doesn’t work that way.

  11. Mick said,

    August 1, 2007 at 3:56 pm

    Hi,
    just played a while with DriveImage XML making backups of my two computers (Desk & Notebook) system’s drives.

    Now I would like to do the following:
    Setting up my Notebook to a multi-boot windows by installing XP once and copying this xp-partition to two other partitions on the same drive but the booting of the 2nd system fails.

    what I did already:
    1- Generated a Boot-CD with UBCD4Win
    2- Booted the CD and started DriveImage XML off of it
    3- backuped notebook’s drive (~ 9GB) to an external usb-drive
    4- partitioned the system drive (60GB) with the GePartEd-Boot-CD to 4 partitions:
    1. 10GB (Windows for Office/Internet) DriveImage XML says: DISK0#1
    2. 10GB (Windows for Audio, NO INTERNET) DriveImage XML says: DISK0#2
    3. 20GB (Windows for Graphics, NO INTERNET) DriveImage XML says: DISK0#3
    4. 15GB (Data, no system) / DriveImage XML says: DISK0#4

    5- That’s how the partition-structure looks like in Windows Disk Manager (booted from 1st partition):
    C:
    10,0 GB NTFS
    error free (start partition)
    E:
    10,0 GB NTFS
    error free
    F:
    20,0 GB NTFS
    error free
    G:
    15,9 GB FAT32
    error free

    while D: is the Optical Drive

    6- I installed Windows XP to the second partition succesfully.
    7- The Windows Boot-Manager has been installed automatically and the second XP was bootable. This step should only install windows’ boot-manager to be able to choose the other windows-installation by keyboard and the necessary boot-files are written to the 1st partition, the editing of the boot.ini should be such of a hassel for the 3rd partition, so I decided to…
    8- Format the second partition again and do a restore with DriveImage XML with the system-backuped partition image to this second partition
    9- after restarting and choosing to boot up the second partition I was given this error message:
    “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
    \system32\hal.dll.
    Please re-install a copy of the above file.”
    10- After checking DriveImage XML’s FAQ and reading http://www.runtime.org/driveimage_faq.htm#boot
    I checked the partitions with Windows Disk Manager and changed the second partition (E :) to be ACTIVE
    11- after restarting the computer and choosing the second Windows to boot again, the same error (hal.dll) appeared

    That’s now the point I’m writing this. Could you help me to get the second partition to boot from without reinstalling windows to it again (and hopefully to the 3rd partition) ?
    Or is it impossible to do a partition copy to get 3 independent windows systems running on one machine, without installing one after another ?
    I’m asking for this complicated procedure, because I would like to do this on a second machine as well and I would need these totally independent windows-installations.

  12. airjrdn said,

    August 2, 2007 at 2:18 am

    I’m dual booting two instances of XP Pro, one for gaming, one for everything else. I just looked at my boot.ini, and there’s no magic there, in fact, this is it:

    [boot loader]
    timeout=30
    default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
    [operating systems]
    multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
    multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS=”Gaming” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

    If you edit your boot.ini so it looks similar to mine, does it boot?

    Honestly, I’ve never done what you’re wanting to do, although I can understand why you’d want to do it.

    Another option may be to do a basic install for partitions E & F, then simply restore the backup of C over them. You’ll still be spending time doing a base install, but you won’t have to install patches, drivers, applications, etc.

    Also, during the base install, you could try this…right after the install reboots mid way through, boot to your UBCD4Win boot cd and do the DriveImage XML restore. At that point I’m betting the “boot stuff” is already setup.

  13. Mick said,

    August 3, 2007 at 10:08 pm

    I did manage to boot the second partition now, there was an error on the second partition: it was marked as ‘boot’…so I changed this back to first partition and could solve one issue.
    Now, there is more a problem of telling windows that it was booted off of drive E, because I deinstalled something from drive E and it disappeared from drive C :)
    Do you know of any Tool capable of changing the system’s drive to E in the registry ? Something like a migration tool, or is DriveImage XML capabale of that by using its Drive To Drive copy ? I guess not but I did not try.
    It must be something that changes everything labeled like c:\windows to e:\windows and all these links in the registry…do you know of any tool like this ?

  14. airjrdn said,

    August 4, 2007 at 3:35 am

    No, I really don’t. I’ve seen tools in the past that claimed to be able to migrate installed applications from one PC to another. Those *might* work, but I have my doubts. Here’s a link to a Google search with results that claim to do that, but I’ve not tried any of them.

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=move+application+to+new+pc&btnG=Google+Search

  15. Mindaugas said,

    August 24, 2007 at 5:48 am

    Thank you for tutorial with free tools.

  16. jameswillisisthebest said,

    September 8, 2007 at 8:31 pm

    This is my first post
    just saying HI

  17. Bato said,

    September 14, 2007 at 1:52 pm

    Hallo, this is my first post.
    I´m from Germany an my English is not so good.
    Here my Questions.

    1. is it possible to create image for two drives (C: and D :) at the same time with the batch file above and store it in one imagefile?
    2. is it possible to restore the image on one new computer (Bare Metall) with bart-pe plugin? If is possible, please tell me how.

    Thanks for help.

    Regards
    Bato

  18. airjrdn said,

    September 15, 2007 at 10:31 pm

    It won’t image both drives at the same time, unless you use two batch files. If you just want both drives to be imaged, but one after the other, then just use the last line of the batch file twice; once for each drive.

    Yes, I use BartPE as a boot disk, and you can get the DriveImage XML BartPE plug-in from here - http://www.runtime.org/peb.htm

  19. Bato said,

    September 17, 2007 at 11:22 am

    Thank you for latest help. Today I will test these possibilities, but i have got one more new question:

    If I want to restore on a new Computer with different Hardware like in the old PC, may i get problems with the Hardwaredriver (for example: Display, Mainboard, Controllers, Network or any other components)? In the image are the Drivers of the old PC. What can I do to implement the new Drivers during the restore? Or do I have to implement the drivers later on a running system?

    Do you have an Idea how to fix this Problem?

    Bato

  20. airjrdn said,

    September 17, 2007 at 1:07 pm

    Windows is generally pretty good about detecting hardware, but I’d never trust it by attempting that. Different hardware = new install in my opinion. This isn’t specific to using DriveImage XML though, you’d have the same issue(s) with Ghost, True Image, etc.

  21. Jabi Aberasturi said,

    October 11, 2007 at 11:55 am

    I´ve tried creatinga a BartPE cd, but although I download DriveImage_xml plugin from dafafda , when i try adding it to Pe Editor, it shows me an error saying the something like this message “SetupIterateCabinet failed”

    The plugin I´ve downloaded is called driveimage_xml.cab
    Could you send the plugin you have used , or give me an URL where I could download an ISO of a BartPE disk containing that plugin ?

    Many thanks !!!

  22. Noel Adler said,

    October 24, 2007 at 7:20 pm

    I doing my first backup using DriveImage XML. I says it will take over 5 hours. I doing disk to disk (Sata internal) with a speedy dual core processor. The file is 128 GB. Is that how long it should take?

  23. airjrdn said,

    October 25, 2007 at 1:06 am

    Do you mean the partition, or drive you’re imaging is 128G, or that there are literally 128G of files on that partition/drive?

    What matters is the data, not the overall size of the partition. For example, a 500G partition with only 2G of data wouldn’t take long to finish. Conversely, a 200G partition with 150G of data would take quite a while. It sounds like you’ve got a decent amount of data. If that’s your boot partition, it sounds like you probably have a lot of “data” on that partition, that might be better placed on a data partition as opposed to your OS/boot partition.

  24. MoHoelX said,

    November 6, 2007 at 7:44 pm

    Question - I have used DriveImageXML on one laptop using an external drive, and it works fine. Took the same external drive to another laptop, and I keep getting an error at different times into it - I get an “ERROR: Sector copy”. The dialog box indicates a problem on the external drive: “Cannot flush write buffer for E:\….”, but scandisk, defrag, etc. do not find any problem (it is FAT32).

    Question - any ideas? and can DriveImageXML be run in XP’s “safe mode”? does anyone think that might help?

    Thanks -

  25. MoHoelX said,

    November 6, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    well, the answer is “no”. seems VSS does not run, and cannot be started, in Safe mode….

  26. airjrdn said,

    November 7, 2007 at 12:37 pm

    Run it from a BartPE CD.

  27. Lynn Sattler said,

    November 15, 2007 at 5:25 am

    Does anybody have the inf file for adding drive image xml to windows pe 2.0 instead of Bart pe. I’ve got a new windows vista machine and don’t have windows xp disks. I’ve got the free windows pe downloaded, but the inf files must have changed between the old pe versions and pe 2.0 that is vista based.

  28. airjrdn said,

    November 15, 2007 at 2:03 pm

    I don’t, but in the past, the support team at DXML’s site have been very responsive. They may be able to help you out.

  29. sadiya said,

    December 4, 2007 at 10:41 pm

    Hi
    this sounds really good, Can i create image on server from the laptop.
    If i can, would i use following script to store image on server ’server’
    del \\server\Images\Older_C.dat
    del \\server\Images\Older_C.xml

    rename \\server\Images\Old_C.dat Older_C.dat
    rename \\server\Images\Old_C.xml Older_C.xml

    rename \\server\Images\Drive_C.dat Old_C.dat
    rename \\server\Images\Drive_C.xml Old_C.xml

    “C:\Program Files\Runtime Software\DriveImage XML\dixml.exe” /bc /t\\server\Images\Drive_C /r- /s- /c /v

  30. Justin G said,

    December 10, 2007 at 5:07 am

    Thanks so much for the primer on using this great program. I’ve had it in my utilities folder for a while and knew it was what I needed but not knowing exactly how to use it. Anyway, 4 or 5 hours later, I think I have a working solution (I’m trying to apply the image I created to a virtual machine right now). I followed your basic scheme but I also wanted to create a log so I could look and see if there were any errors and I wanted the logs to be dated. Here is my batch script and again, a sincere THANKS! :)

    echo date/t
    echo Results for deleting Older_C (no results = success) > Backup-Log.txt
    del H:\Images\Older_C.dat >> Backup-Log.txt 2>&1
    del H:\Images\Older_C.xml >> Backup-Log.txt 2>&1
    echo —————— >> Backup-Log.txt

    echo Results for renaming Old_C to Older_C (no results = success) >> Backup-Log.txt
    rename H:\Images\Old_C.dat Older_C.dat >> Backup-Log.txt 2>&1
    rename H:\Images\Old_C.xml Older_C.xml >> Backup-Log.txt 2>&1
    echo —————— >> Backup-Log.txt

    echo Results for renaming Drive_C to Old_C (no results = success) >> Backup-Log.txt
    rename H:\Images\Drive_C.dat Old_C.dat >> Backup-Log.txt 2>&1
    rename H:\Images\Drive_C.xml Old_C.xml >> Backup-Log.txt 2>&1
    echo —————— >> Backup-Log.txt

    echo Results for creating image named Drive_C on H:\Images (no results = success) >> Backup-Log.txt
    “C:\Program Files\Runtime Software\DriveImage XML\dixml.exe” /bC /tH:\Images\Drive_C /r- /s- /c /v 2> Backup-Log.txt 2>&1
    echo —————— >> Backup-Log.txt

    for /f “tokens=1-5 delims=/ ” %%d in (”%date%” ;) do rename “Backup-Log.txt” Backup-Log-%%e-%%f-%%g.txt

    for /f “tokens=1-5 delims=/ ” %%d in (”%date%” ;) do copy “Backup-Log-%%e-%%f-%%g.txt” H:\Images\Logs\Backup-Log-%%e-%%f-%%g.txt

  31. airjrdn said,

    December 10, 2007 at 2:36 pm

    You’re welcome, I’m glad it got you going.

    While testing it in the VM, are you going to install XP first to get a bootable partition or what are you doing to make it bootable?

  32. kimotheraphy said,

    December 20, 2007 at 10:39 am

    Forgive this newbie question … What does one do is Windows XP disks did not come with the purchased laptop? ie. I have a Thinkpad which did not come with Windows XP disks. Any way to use DriveImage XML for ppl with new laptops that did not come with SP disks? Any help would be appreciated .. thank you.

  33. airjrdn said,

    December 20, 2007 at 3:03 pm

    DriveImage XML will make the image without requiring you to have XP disks. The trouble might come when you need to do a full restore, and at that point, it’s the building of the BartPE disk that would hold you up.

    With no disks, I can only think of about 4 options….
    1 - Contact IBM and see if you can get the physical media for re-installation. If they aren’t responsive, try Microsoft, they actually might send you physical media for a very low cost.

    2 - Depending on the maker of your harddrive, you may be able to get a copy of Acronis True Image for free. If it’s a Seagate or Maxtor, you can get an OEM version of True Image free. Here are more details on that - http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/05/22/one-of-the-best-hdd-utilities-is-free

    3 - Use a disk from a friend to build your BartPE disk. You won’t be using their CDKey, so they won’t have to worry about you activating Windows with their key or anything. You’ll just be building your bootable disk with their CD.

    4 - Other products come with their own bootable disks. There might be free alternatives, but none that I’ve personally tested. Acronis True Image is probably what I’d spring for, and it’s on sale at 50% off right now for the holidays.

  34. Noby said,

    December 29, 2007 at 2:30 pm

    What’s if Drive Image not work correct and build no Image?
    I think you delete all previous images each time the batch is started.
    You shoud change your batch to this:
    IF not exist Drive_C.dat goto DRVIMG

    if exist Older_C.dat del Older_C.dat
    if exist Older_C.xml del Older_C.xml

    if exist Old_C.dat rename Old_C.dat Older_C.dat
    if exist Old_C.xml rename Old_C.xml Older_C.xml

    if exist Drive_C.dat rename Drive_C.dat Old_C.dat
    if exist Drive_C.xml rename Drive_C.xml Old_C.xml

    :DRVIMG
    “C:\Program Files\Runtime Software\DriveImage XML\dixml.exe” /bc /t”E:\Images\Drive_C” /r- /s- /c /v

  35. Kooter said,

    December 29, 2007 at 10:46 pm

    I have an HP Pavilion zv5000 notebook with XP SP2. I tried to perform a backup using driveImage Xml. Problem is, 15 minutes into the process, I get the following read error that states Data Error (cyclic redundancy check) with the option to cancel, ignore, or retry. I performed a chkdsk on the drive and attempted another backup to no avail. Any ideas short of replacing the hard drive?

  36. airjrdn said,

    December 30, 2007 at 4:42 am

    Kooter - If you are getting CRC errors, a new HD is in your future anyway. Since an image won’t complete, do yourself a favor and backup all of your personal data to another drive.

  37. airjrdn said,

    December 30, 2007 at 4:44 am

    Noby - I don’t think it would delete all of them. After a few nights it would, but it wouldn’t on the first occurrence.

    I’m no batch file guru, will the if exist statements work, or were you just saying that’s what it needs to do?

  38. ted said,

    December 30, 2007 at 9:09 pm

    whats the best way?
    the laptop i am typing this on is filling up rapidly 48gig-44gigused!
    I would like to move the whole thing to a new 100gig laptop drive. I have a nice little usb caddy that will hold the new 100gig drive in it.
    If i use My Computer>Manage>Disk Management to format the new drive with one big partition of FAT32(same as the original internal drive).
    Then use driveimage xml running on the internal drive to put an image of the internal drive directly onto the external drive.(can you run on the drive your copying?or does it have to be inactive?)
    Then unplug the external drive and switch it with the previous internal drive.
    Then change the bios to boot from the new internal drive (probably called E: or F: or something due to previously being an external drive.)
    Then go into My Computer>Manage>Disk Management to rename the drive C:

    Is this feasible because i just dreamt it up and i have no knowledge of how to up grade my laptop drive….ide slave/master etc is all useless for my situation so if anyone has done a laptop upgrade, a step-through would be much appreciated.Thanks.

  39. airjrdn said,

    December 31, 2007 at 12:25 am

    If you are fairly new to upgrading laptop drives, then you’d probably better look into something that’ll handle everything for you, like making the drive bootable, writing boot sector info to the new drive, etc. DriveImage XML isn’t going to do that.

    For someone less experienced, I’d suggest something like Acronis Migrate Easy if the new drive you purchase doesn’t come with software to migrate your OS & data over.

    Acronis is pretty active in their forums, so any questions there will probably be answered timely. What would be optimal is if you could hook the new drive up via USB, run Migrate Easy, having it mirror the internal drive to the external one, then simply swap them out and be on your way. Without trying it myself though, I’m hesitant to fully suggest purchasing it. I believe there is a demo version available for you to try before you buy.

    If you have a 3rd external drive available, I would think you could use Acronis True Image to create an image of your internal drive stored on your 3rd external drive, then boot to the Acronis boot CD and restore that image to your new (replacement) internal drive.

  40. Josh said,

    January 8, 2008 at 4:56 am

    Ok I am able to do a complete restore on my drive c: using the bart pe cd…this is great however I would like to back up my backup image by writing the files to cd….i have it broken up into 650 m chunks so it can be written to cd….but which file do I burn first…should I burn them in any particular sequence….and when I do a systemn restore can I do it direstly from cd while using the bart pe disck in one rom drive and the back up files in my secondary cd drive…will it prompt me for the disks in a particular order? thankyou I hope someone can help me with this…

  41. Mad Ape said,

    January 10, 2008 at 10:18 am

    Hello

    I had a complete hard drive crash so I put in a new one, reinstalled all software and documents and installed DriveImage XML.

    The very first time it ran I got the error message Data error (cyclic redundancy check) If I click the retry button it starts working again and completes properly.

    I doubt that my new hard drive is bad so I am thinking that this software has a bug in it.

    Any suggestions?

    The Mad Ape

  42. airjrdn said,

    January 10, 2008 at 12:35 pm

    Josh - If you broke them up into 650M chunks by telling DXML to do it, you can burn them in any order, and the restore will ask for them in the correct order I would assume. I’ve not tried this but I can’t think of any reason that wouldn’t work.

    Mad Ape - Every drive manufacturer has bad new drives. It would probably be a good idea for you to run some disk utilities to check the drive. Go to the site of the drive manufacturer (Seagate, Maxtor, etc.) and get their drive check utility. Run it and see what it says about your drive. CRC errors aren’t something you want to ignore.

  43. Pegasis7 said,

    January 15, 2008 at 3:36 pm

    Post #32 asked about how to create a Bart PE disk if you computer did not come with a Win XP disk. If your computer has an i386 folder all the necessary files for creating a Bart PE disk are located there (including the SP2 files if your system has been upgraded).

    I have created several Bart PE disk using this technique without needing the WinXP CD.

  44. Clauprevo said,

    January 21, 2008 at 11:55 pm

    I have an HP Pavilion that came with Windows Vista Home Premium with
    a recovery disk. Can I do something to create my Bart PE disk .

  45. airjrdn said,

    January 22, 2008 at 12:48 pm

    Maybe. According to post #43, all you really need is the i386 folder. If you still have XP installed, you can probably get what you need from there. Other than that, I’d say try one of the options from post #33.

  46. WPW said,

    January 31, 2008 at 2:50 pm

    Can dixml directly copy from drive to drive or does it always have to go via a local dump first?

  47. Ron Bertino said,

    January 31, 2008 at 4:28 pm

    For those having issues with creating a boot disk with BartPE, you really should take a look at the Ultimate Boot CD:
    http://www.ubcd4win.com

    It comes with a whole variety of extra plug-ins, including the one for DriveImage XML.

  48. WPW said,

    January 31, 2008 at 7:34 pm

    > The program allows you to:
    >
    > ………
    > Copy directly from drive to drive

    Ahum… never mind :)

  49. bfwcom said,

    February 6, 2008 at 9:29 pm

    I have been having problems with restores. This is my setup:

    I have a bartPE disk with DriveImageXML plugin installed. I am using an external USB drive to store the backups directly to. This external USB drive is formatted Fat32. After booting from the bartPE disk I run the backup utility and create a compressed “Drive_C.xml and DAT file and place it on the external USB drive. The computer I am backing up is Dell laptop with a 100GB drive that is formatted NTFS and includes Windows XP. The backup runs fine.

    On the External USB drive I have created four separate FAT32 partitions and labled them according to the computer models I want to back up. This is so I can maintain separation of the image files. Each of the four patitions is about 10GB which is fine because the image is never larger than about 5-6 GB. So far I have had problems with all the backups I have created in the separate partitions.

    To test the restore, I replace the original 100GB disk in the laptop with a new identical, blank NTFS formatted drive. The disk’s geometry is identical. I get an error the states “the target drive must be the same size or larger than the source.” It is. If I replace the disk with a 120GB drive that I have partitioned and formatted NTFS, the restore completes, but the computer will not find a boot device after restarting the computer. What should I try next?

  50. airjrdn said,

    February 8, 2008 at 3:19 am

    First, a quick question. When you said “So far I have had problems with all the backups I have created in the separate partitions.” Did you mean you have had *no* problems, or were you saying you’ve had problems doing the restores every time?

    There are a couple of things to note here…

    1 - It’s just a guess, but unless those two 100G drives are actually identical (models, etc.) it’s possible that one is actually slightly larger than the other. That could be the reason for the restore/size issue.

    2 - If my memory serves me correctly, Fat32 has a file size limitation of 4G, so I’m not sure how you’re storing 5-6G images on Fat32 partitions.

    3 - I think the reason it won’t boot after restoring to the 120G drive is because the boot sector/master boot record (mbr) isn’t set. Have you looked at http://www.runtime.org/driveimage_faq.htm#boot ?

  51. kabi said,

    February 13, 2008 at 8:52 pm

    Anyone with experience at doing a bare metal restore to a dissimilar system using DriveImage XML and/or other solutions. (In the event of a mother board failure, etc., I don’t want to spend several days reloading XP and all my software with updates and drivers, etc.)

    Acronis purports to provide such a solution, but the programs have many other features and functionality that I’m not interested in using or having on my system.

    http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/

    http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATICW/universal-restore.html

  52. airjrdn said,

    February 14, 2008 at 7:05 pm

    I’ve used Acronis True Image in the past and like it. I had only used it to restore to the same hardware that I’d backed up from though. I personally would never use an image on a machine that had different hardware than the backup was made from. While I’m sure most things won’t have any issues, I’d prefer not to have drivers installed for hardware not currently in the machine.

    For some things it might not be bad, but chipset drivers, etc. get into questionable territory in my opinion. It would be one thing if you had replaced your soundcard and were doing a restore using a backup from when you had the earlier one, but totally different hardware is another thing.

    I don’t think there’s anything in DriveImage XML that would stop you from doing it, but I personally wouldn’t recommend it…regardless of the backup solution you used.

  53. ron said,

    February 26, 2008 at 3:09 am

    Am experimenting with this product at this moment and want to copy the results to DVD-R instead of CD’s. Is it possible to resize the output so that DriveImage XML generates files that match the size of the DVD’s?

  54. airjrdn said,

    February 28, 2008 at 5:27 pm

    Not that I’m aware of. I just checked their command line options as well and didn’t see anything there either unfortunately.

  55. Dave said,

    April 17, 2008 at 10:35 am

    I also encountered this “Could not flush write buffer” problem, and found an explanation at the following URL: http://drivedoctor.co.za/blog.aspx.
    It seems the problem is that (as in my case) You are trying to backup to FAT32-formatted disk, and the backup file exceeds the 4 GB size limit of this file system. Try to activate the “split large files” option in the backup setup…

    Good luck!

    Dave

  56. Frank said,

    May 6, 2008 at 4:00 pm

    Hi there,
    I seem to be having a bit of trouble with DriveImageXML. I had it working at first but now there seems to be a problem when I try to do Backups. Just as it starts the Backup process I get the following error: “Could not initialize Windows Volume Shadow Service (VSS). Code: ERROR 80042318. Make sure VSSVC.EXE is running in your task manager. Click Help for more information.” I have checked Task Manager and VSSVC is running. I have also checked Services in Administrative Tools and both MS Software Shadow Copy Provider and Volume Shadow Copy show ’started’ as status.

    Has anyone run into this before? Do you have any suggestions that you think might help me? Thanks in advance.

    Frank

  57. airjrdn said,

    May 8, 2008 at 2:24 am

    There are a couple of potential solutions on this page - http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/775703.html

    But I personally haven’t had that issue. Since going to Vista though, I now boot up into a BartPE disk to do the backups, so I won’t be running into that problem. It’s not as convenient, but then again, neither is Vista. ;)

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