How To make backup "image" les of your entire Windows "C:" drive.

(HowToMakeWinBackupImage beta v0.8, Bill Day 2007 compteam AT chem.duke.edu).

A short, illustrated, step-by-step procedure for any windows user on how to make a backup
image of entire C-drive. For the impatient, jump down to QUICKSTART section. For
newbies, before running on important pc, try it on a pc you don't care about (or an emulator
like free Vitrual PC.)
INTRODUCTION/ OVERVIEW
If you google for "cloning hard-drive" or "imaging hard-drive", you'll nd mention of widely-
used imaging/cloning software including:
"Ghost" from Norton/Symantec
"PartImage" (included on most free linux live-cd's such as knoppix)
"Drive Image/Drive Deploy" from "Powerquest" (now owned by Symantec).
All of these products can be used to efciently clone one pc to another, and/or save an
"image" of the hard drive to a set of compressed les. Such les are the best form of
backup, especially if/when your hard-drive fails. With those image les and a boot-cd, in
typically 20-30 minutes you can do a "bare-metal" restore: that is, starting with a blank,
new hard drive, your computer will be restored to the exact state it had when you created
the image les. That includes ALL your software, updates, les and settings: everything is
back, and bootable. (This is much preferable to re-installing your operating system and all
your software from scratch!)
In the example below, we'll backup a C-drive with about 2gig to a set of image les of a size
to t on cd (each image le is 660meg, except the last one which is less). If you have a
more likely 20gig used on your c-drive, your image les would likely total about 10gig,
taking about 16 cds, or about 4 dvds.
SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
This how-to document describes how use the software Duke folks can obtain from http://
www.oit.duke.edu/site/ You have to get right version for your Windows per below. (To nd
out which Windows you have, open "My Computer" and do Help: About.)
Vista (This document does NOT apply to Windows Vista)
Windows XP Get "Drive Deploy" ($4). Already on all duke-owned pcs.
Windows 2000,ME,98,95,3.1 Get "Drive Image"
If you have a duke-owned box, you may already have above software. Others should
download and install the above software. During install, it may prompt you to make 1 or 2
boot diskette(s): if you don't have diskettes or drive, you can skip that step. If you want to
make a boot cd, it can be made from the boot diskettes: contact support.
HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS
Any windows pc listed above, and a drive-letter other than C with enough free space. That
is, image les cannot be written C-drive: but instead must be written to an external drive (or
seperate partition, that is, a drive-letter other than C in "My Computer"). Contact support to
borrow an external drive (or if any questions).
To nd out how much space will be needed:
1. Right-click on your C-drive, then Properties, for a pie-chart showing how much space is
used (gure 1). You can click on "Disk Cleanup" to free up space.
In above example, the C-drive is using 1.8gig, which is the amount we'll backup.
For many modern XP installs, you could easily have 10 or 20 times these numbers, such as
C using 20gig in which case you'll need 10gig free on the other drive.
And give the C-drive a short label with the size and type, such as 32GIG-NTFS for a 32gig
hard-drive (the type is usually NTFS but could also be FAT32 or even FAT). The example
C-drive is labeled "3GIG-NTFS". For a 24gig drive, use 24GIG-NTFS.
2. Repeat step 1 for the other drive (where we'll store image les): it will need to have Free
space of at least half the amount we'll backup. In our example, half the amount we'll backup
is half of 1.8gig, or 0.9gig (=900 MB). And again label the drive with a name such as
10GIG-FAT32 for a 10gig drive. In our example, the lable is 1GIGFAT-IMG for the partition
where image les will be written.
QUICKSTART... Backing up entire C-drive just boils down to steps A-F.
(A.) Start the imaging software, which will notify you that it is going to reboot your pc. (It
boots just this one time from a "virtual" oppy or your actual oppy or cd) by any of the
following methods.
On duke-owned windows-xp boxes, search for "deploy.exe" ,run it and hit "Reboot
Now" button.

If you've installed drive-image or drive-deploy software run it from the Start:
Programs: menu, and hit "Reboot Now".
If you have a diskette or cd, you can restart your pc, and hit F12 (or maybe F2 or del)
to choose to boot from cd or oppy.
(B.) Your pc should boot to Drive Deploy (or Drive Image) screen, where you see 3 buttons:
Create, Restore, and "Disk-to-Disk. (Optionally select Display Drive Info.)
(C.) "Select Source Partitions". (If you are in Drive Info, Hit "Close" to exit back to main
menu.). Now hit "Create Image" button, then put a check-mark in box for 1st NTFS partition:
Our example shows a 4gig drive, divided in 2 parts: 3gig-NTFS & 1GIGFAT-IMG.
The NTFS partition is the "Source", in other words, what we are going to backup.
So it gets the check-mark in box at left. Then hit "Next".
NOTE: If you see a "DellUtility" or any other small partitions before (on top) of the NTFS
one, put check mark by those also.
WARNING! Always go by the disk-label(s) when selecting the Source and Desitination. And
always Ignore any drive-letters shown in imaging software: drive-c in the imaging software
is usuallly NOT drive-c in windows.
(D.) In "Name Image File" window, hit the "Browse" button, to bring up "New Image File"
window. At the bottom of the window, in scroll box, select the drive where we'll write the
image les by it's label (not Letter).
We selected 10GIGFAT-IMG partition to write those image les to. You'll probably have to
scroll down to get to external or other drives. (We tend to prefer to write images to FAT32
rather than NTFS partitions).
Finally type in a simple lename (max of 8-characters, no spaces, ending in ".PQI"),
Again, note that in the example, it shows "C:\2007-05.pqi" but the le is not being written to
the C-drive in Windows, but actually to the drive labeled 10GIGFAT-IMG.
Optionally add a short comment with info on sw and hardware. Then hit Next.

(E.) In Compress Image File window, click"High" (smallest image le size). Hit Next, and
"Advanced Options", to put check in box of bottom item "Split Image File into Multiple Files"
(leave the default File Size, 670,000,000, which is cd-sized).
Do NOT select any of the Verify options... it is better to verify after image is made.
(F.) In "Ready to Create Image File", review the info. Use "Back" if you need to double-
check or change anything. Once everything looks ok, hit the "Finish" button to start making
the image le(s). Stick around for the rst few minutes to make sure it is off to a good start...
if problems occur, they tend to show in rst few minutes (while checking integrity) . If you
have 10's of gigabytes, it may take a while to nish, especially if writing to an external USB
drive.If you get any errors, contact support folks. And, if your display goes to sleep during a
long backup, do NOT hit "Enter" key to wake it up, as this may in effect hit the "Cancel"
button: it's safer to hit the spacebar or move the mouse
When done, a message saying "Image was copied succesfully to le: xxxxxxx.pqi" stays on
screen until you hit ok, taking you back to main menu. If you have time, you can optionally
verify the image as follows: select "Restore Image". Browse to navigate and select the PQI
le you just created, then hit the Verify button. The verify can take some time also, but not
as long as to create the image. Don't do the actual restore right now: you'll only need to do
that if your C-drive is bad, windows won't boot etc. Get support before trying a restore. You
quit the program with the Exit button. Then reboot (ctrl-al-del) back to windows. In windows,
you can burn the image les to cds or dvds. In our example we see a set of les named:
2007-05.PQI
2007-05.002
2007-05.003
2007-05.004
,,, and so on upto the last le, You need ALL of these les, NOT just the .PQI to do a restore.
(Also note that there are windows programs named "Image Editor" or "Image Explorer" that
let you verify image les, and even extract just certain les or folders (just like a zip le)
which is really cool.
HINTS, ADVANCED TOPICS, and TROUBLESHOOTING
PRELIMINARIES. Before making the image, we generally do these 3 steps:
1. download and install TreeSize from http://www.oit.duke.edu/site and use it to nd if there
are any large les and folders you can safely delete. (Obviously, don't delete anything
unless you are 100% sure you don't need it.)
2. Run Disk Cleanup. It runs much quicker if you rst run this registry-hack:
3. Start: Run: (type in) CHKDSK (and hit enter). If you see only a few errors, type "CHKDSK
/F" and when it asks if you want to check at startup, say "Y (yes). BUT, if you see more than
a few errors, contact support and/or do a SMART check of your hard-drive.
RESIZING PARTITON(S)
Once you have a veried backup image of your C-drive, then that is a good time to re-size
the partition to free up space for a partition to store image les. This allows you to make a
backup-image without an external drive, and later you can copy or move the image les to
a safe place, like external drive or burn to cd(s) or dvd(s).
Contact support about resizing C-drive: we use Partition Magic or free ntfsresize: it is
important not to change the location of the boot partition.
Using partimage, the destination for image les can be another computer or server le
space as well as external drive(s). We often use partimage on a knoppix cd to make a
backup of a single-partition drive before we resize and break it into multiple partitions.