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sorry my mistake, i thought you wanted to have an unattended install Ie; drivers,serial no: installed witout having to do anything except put the cd in and come back in 20mins when its all done. now if you want all settings - games - apps - email then ghost is definatley the way to go,it will put everthing back excactley the way it was,if you back up regulary that is. the program is this dogs. only downside as with all these programs is you need to have the hdd space or a dvd/rw, to backup onto. go for ghost!!!!

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Of all the useful information on this thread, the comments from Mosaddique, together with his web site, look the most relevant. Could I ask Mosaddique to provide more details of how he managed to create a bootable CD/DVD? Some questions that come to mind are: Can you use DVD rather than CD? Do you have to do anything to get the restored machine booting from hard drive? Is the scripting, with check before reformatting the hard drive included in autoexec.bat? If the disk image exceeds 650M, can it be split across multiple CD's? Thanks In Advance

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Hello Rbowen, Hello Everyone To answer the questions: 1. I do not see why you could not use a DVD Writer instead of a CD Writer. I do not possess a DVD Writer so I have not tried that method. 2. My recovery CDs do not need to do anything extra to the hard drive. I.e. it is immediately bootable once the image is restored to it. 3. My scripting is done a three levels. a). Autoexec.bat and config.sys is used to load the CDROM driver (using drive letter Q) and to execute another bat file called warnings.bat b). Warnings.bat is used to double check that recovery is required. Then the PowerQuest Drive Image is invoked with a script file (script.txt) to select, delete and restore image to the appropriate partition. The scripts I use are given at the end. 4. Yes you can span CDs. This is done at the point of creating the image. Drive Image has advanced options which allows an image file not to exceed 670 MB (the size is selectable). If it does then it starts a continuation file and so on till the image is created. For example if your total image size was 1.5 GB. Then Drive Image would create three files called: Image001.pqi (670 MB), image001.002 (670 MB) and image001.003 (160 MB). My script files are as below: Autoexec.bat ------------ @ECHO OFF PROMPT $P$G MSCDEX.EXE /D:PQCDROM /L:Q warnings.bat Config.sys ----------- DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS DOS=HIGH,UMB DEVICE=OAKCDROM.SYS /D:PQCDROM LASTDRIVE=Z Warnings.bat ------------ echo. echo. echo INSERT THE RECOVERY CD IN CD-ROM DRIVE NOW! echo. echo. echo The recovery CD will restore the system to its echo original install state. Any other programs or files echo will be deleted, it is strongly recommended that echo you backup any important data before continuing. echo. choice Would you like to continue with the recovery? if errorlevel 2 goto end echo. cls echo Recovery Disk echo. echo WARNING! If you continue you will erase everything from you hard drive echo. echo You are about to start the recovery procedure echo this will erase everything that is currently on echo your hard drive. echo. echo Are you sure you want to restore system? choice CAll data will be lost! if errorlevel 2 goto end Q: PQDI /IMG=Q:\BACKUP01.PQI /CMD=A:\SCRIPT.TXT :end Script.txt ---------- // Select, from the first drive, the first partition and delete it SELECT DRIVE 1 SELECT PARTITION 1 DELETE // Select the first available freespace, select the first image and restore it SELECT FREESPACE FIRST SELECT IMAGE 1 RESTORE NOTES: The image file is always named by me as BACKUP01.PQI (BACKUP01.002, BACKUP01.003, etc). This avoids having to edit the warnings.bat file for different images. Drive Image creates two floppies when you install it. I use the first bootable floppy, suitably modified with my script file as above, as the source image floppy when I create the bootable CDROM with the first image BACKUP001.PQI (using Nero). The contents of the second Drive Image floppy is also written to the bootable CD. The subsequent CDs holding additional parts of the image (ie. BACKUP001.002, BACKUP001.003, etc) are written to CD as normal non-bootable CDs. Drive Image knows and will prompt for subsequent CDs when you perform a restore. I hope this helps. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

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For more information on scripting with Drive Image Pro: Look Here ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

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I finally found the link to the procedure which I had obtained from the old powerquest tutorials site which no longer exists. This is the procedure that I have detailed in my earlier posting. This describes "How to Create a Bootable CD with DeployCenter 5.0 or Drive Image Pro 4.0 to Restore an Image File". The procedure is now hosted by Symantec (they now own Drive Image). The official procedure of how to can be found here. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.