[Replying to my own post as there's no specific post to reply to to give an update]

I knew that Samsung netbook had a restore capability, but I'd forgotten, or not realised, that the same feature also gave the capability of creating an image of the C: drive either to - in my case - the D: drive (partition) or to 1 or more DVDs.

I'll take an image to both media.

The only problem I see is that if the drive itself goes belly up I'm not sure how I can retrieve the image from the DVDs. The files have the type(s) of .woo, .wcl, .w01, .w02

Any thoughts?

Not exactly relevant: but with Win7 I initially wrote the image to an external usb HDD drive and update the image every now and again by over-writing . And like you I not sure how to use it if it should ever become necessary...guess I could boot the pc from that drive, but I'm not sure

I am sure it is possible to restore, my suggestion would be to try it next time you have a couple of hours to spare, as when things go wrong you will invariably be under pressure.

Before you try it make sure that you have downloaded a live CD/DVD of say Kubuntu and perhaps a live CD of Gparted, as well as having access to the software that is supposed to be used for restoration.

In reply to a post by philippercival:

I am sure it is possible to restore, my suggestion would be to try it next time you have a couple of hours to spare, as when things go wrong you will invariably be under pressure.

There shouldn't be any pressure since the Win7 machine is dedicated to video editing and I backup all editing projects and video/photo/audio files to a storage drive.

Thanks for the info and advice though

Edited by 4M2 (Wed 27-Feb-13 14:25:49)

In reply to a post by 4M2:

Not exactly relevant: but with Win7 I initially wrote the image to an external usb HDD drive and update the image every now and again by over-writing . And like you I not sure how to use it if it should ever become necessary...guess I could boot the pc from that drive, but I'm not sure

You should keep a bare pristine image taken immediately after the OS, drivers and any "always used" software is installed. Other images can be taken afterwards. That way, if anything unnoticed has gone awry, or major changes to software used etc occur, you still have the original pristine image.

Indeed.

To recover from the image I need to be able to run the Samsung utility, albeit from the hidden partition wherever that is.

But if the HDD itself goes belly up there's no viable hidden partition to run. So I need to be able to boot from something somewhere enough to be able to run the recovery utility from a Windows XP system. Though even that, i think, requires the hidden partition to be viable as that's where mini-Windows (PE?) resides.

It would seem I need a bootable XP Windows environment that can run the Samsung utility to recover the drive C:.

Or should I be using a completely different strategy?

Well with XP I would do a clean install of the OS (hopefully, in my case, with sp2 slipstreamed to sp3) as discussed earlier.

All program installers (which are not on cd/dvd) and my documents are backed up onto another HDD. I do have all the drivers on a separate utility cd also.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

...... Or should I be using a completely different strategy?

In a word, yes! Try the two freebies I mentioned above and be sure that with whichever one that you choose, create the bootable rescue CD.

In reply to a post by Deadbeat:

You should keep a bare pristine image taken immediately after the OS, drivers and any "always used" software is installed. Other images can be taken afterwards. That way, if anything unnoticed has gone awry, or major changes to software used etc occur, you still have the original pristine image.

OK - so Win7 seems OK at the moment meaning that any further images should be written/over-written separately?

It's good practice to keep a bare image so that you can start again from scratch without the hassle of installing and updating etc.
I usually take 3 images - A bare one as described above, a "full" one which is taken when everything that I normally use is installed and set up and then a third taken when any major changes take place. This is the one that I overwrite regularly.

I've only ever installed Acronis when I buy a new version. Once I've created the bootable media, I uninstall the program and stick to the boot CD/USB drive.

Edited by Deadbeat (Wed 27-Feb-13 14:59:26)