Hi Guys I am going to start using Vista backup and Restore rather than Ghost etc, but am unable to find a straight answer online to simple question: Using the full system restore from the boot DVD, can I restore an image from an external USB hard drive? Thanks FJ faster, better, MORE!!

There's perhaps a valid reason a straight answer wasn't that obvious. "One of the current issues faced by Vista users is the fact that the Windows Recovery Environment (RE) fails to identify the external USB hard drives even though the drives were present at the time the backup was created. The actual problem lies with the fact that Windows RE does not have the driver for the hard drive. In this case, the driver has to be loaded manually with Drvload.exe, in X:windowssystem32 in Windows RE. "Drvload.exe needs to be run on the .inf file of the driver. (You can find more information about Drvload.exe here.) In Windows Vista SP1, we are adding the option to load drivers from Complete PC Restore to simplify this procedure," revealed a member of the Windows Core File Services team. There are however some limitations associated with the hardware and you should be aware of them when you use Complete PC Restore. First off, as long as all the drivers are in place, there are no actual restrictions as to the interface. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Comp... If you run into any issue or complications during your attempt of the task, I'd suggest you stick with Ghost.

FWIW I've restored my Vista Ultimate partition from a USB drive many times using the Vista DVD. I created the backups while in Vista using the Backup Complete PC. I then restored it the same way but using the standalone DVD. I've had no problems at all. In fact it is very fast. The downside is that you can only have one backup per partition since there is no option to put the backup anywhere in particular. It is placed in the root directory. I also think when you backup to the same drive only the changes that were made are copied over. TO have multiple backups laying around I backup my C: drive to a few other drives. Also you can't restore an image to a different drive. If you back up C: you have no choice but to restore to C:.

Food for thought guys... While i'd really love to use the Vista option, I just feel it's pretty risky at present. I think I'll install ghost and go with that for now... Thanks Andy faster, better, MORE!!