Image copy of system disk
jcon
I recently had malware so bad on my computer that I was forced to do a
clean install (Windows XP
Home). Since I have teenagers and this is likely to happen again, I
simply bought a new hard disk,
with the idea that once I had the new system set up and the personal
files copied, I would
make an image copy onto the old disk, so I could swap disks so I
didn't have to start from
absolute zero if this happened again, or if the disk crashes.
I used the disk copy utility in Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, and it
appeared to work - that is,
the disk appeared to be identical. However, when I went to test it,
it booted up fine as far
as I could tell, but it ended with a empty "Windows XP" login screen;
ie, no users and no way to
log in. Same behavior in safe mode.
I see two possibilities
- When I had the disk mounted as an ordinary disk, I set the drive
letter to O:. Could that
be confusing it even though I physically moved it to DISK0#0? (that
is, are drive letters referenced to
drive SN or cable location?)
- Is this some windows security thing to keep me from generating
copies of the OS?
In either case, is there some way around this? Is there a better way
to do it (for example,
does Image Copy XML actually work)?
Any advice would be appreciated.
-jc