Is there a way for an average consumer to create a partition used by sony, dell and other manufacturers for recovery using eisa partition?... kinda getting tired of formatting and starting off from scratch every time winxp reaches it's half life. And not to mention the 800mb of updates that can take an entire day. I have tried trueimage, ghost and found my images been "not valid" even if the dvd's are not scratched. Also, I did checked my images and validated them (it passed) right after I have burned them to disk. But, after the half life period and time to format and reinstall, sadly the images are all "not valid" anymore. thanks for the help... I just want to be able to install windows, updates, my programs and configure my system and then, do a "recovery" on it. And I want the image to be in the hd and is not detectable under winxp. Thank you.

>> kinda getting tired of formatting and starting off from scratch every time winxp reaches it's half life. << Why? I have had Windows XP from the day it was released and have never had to reinstall it once. I have reinstalled it a few time but that has been fro reasons outside anything to do with Windows. I have an installation on a laptop that has been going for over three years. This installation is new, but then so is the computer. The previous installation I had was well over two years old. Stuart

If you could duplicate that partition it still will only restore to the condition the computer was in when new. What about all the MS updates, new programs you installed, personal files, etc. Try using an imaging program like Ghost. You create an image, preferably soon after you have all updates, programs, etc. running well. I prefer imaging to optical media. Also, remember tho old addage. It is not if your harddrive dies but when. FYI there is a difference between a backup of files and an image of a partition. You can restore from a verified image and you partition should be an exact clone of the original as it was when the image was created.