Windows recovery query

[AudioVayne]

In the July 2009 of Atomic magazine, there's an article explaining how to setup a System Restore on a flashdrive. The main idea being when you completely mess up your install you run the flashdrive and setup to run the restore and all is well in the world.


My intention for such a device is to use it on any machine that is having the usual problems that one would just reinstall to save on time...

My questions are:

- If you were to create a simple restore point, would you be able to use it on another machine? (Taking into account different chipsets, drivers, service packs, primarily for XP at this stage)
- Running the RP, one would assume you lose all applications, but would your data be safe or would this effectively wipe all data and restore it to the planned state?

I'm going to set it up with a fresh install of XP Home with SP3, with drivers setup to the local machine. At this stage it'll take a while till I can try it out on another computer but I will be interested to learn more of the limitations of this process...If all goes well then I can utilise this tool to avoid doing as many re-installs....


Cheers

Blair

 

[AudioVayne]

Well I have trialed this, and true to my suspicions it failed horrendously on my second computer to run the restore to. I did suspect that being different chipsets, drivers, etc that it wouldn't work, and was confirmed with a series of blue screens on startup.

Although, for a master system restore point for your own PC or Laptop (for those of us who tinker too much for our own good, or the just plain paranoid) then there is a successful way of creating a restore point which can be saved to CD, seperated recovery partition, HDD or flashdrive / bootable flashdrive!


My trial project is to wipe the HDD and see if I can simulate a new HDD...The objective here is for those who run SATA HDDs and want to upgrade to a bigger drive, if they can simply restore this to have all their data.

Kindof pointless considering the cloning abilites of many applications, but if for whatever reason (thinking of the FAT32 filesystem having errors, bad sectors, damaged HDD or not being able to run chkdsk) then it is an alternate route for a relatively simple problem, maintaining all data at time of backup, applications and settings.

 

[AudioVayne]

I am not sure what the go is with posting copyrighted material, so I will not upload my scans of the articles to which article I am talking about, but I am sure that sharing an interesting topic privately with a friend isn't illegal...