Batboard

So here is my dilemma:
I have a Dell Lattitude C610 laptop that I bought through work. It came with nothing more than the computer, a power supply and a mouse. It has windows 2000NT installed, 20gig HD, 1gig processor, and 256 ram.

First and foremost, I want to copy the hard drive so if something goes wrong, I can wipe it and dump the copy in. How do I do that?

Second, I want to up date it to Win XP. I have been told it can be done.

• 1st - can it truely be done?
  2nd - What do I need to do it?
  3rd - If I screw up, will I still be able to wipe it clean and dump the 2000NT back up back into it?

Thank you,
Higgy

Sure. Buy XP, boot from the CD, and follow the instructions. You're going to want to up it to at least 512mb of RAM. You won't be going back to 2000 unless you have a 2000 CD to do the same thing with.

In order to back up the hard drive so that it's possible to revert back to it's present state, you need to use a program such as Norton Ghost or True Image. Unless you have a second hard drive or a separate partition in which to keep the resulting image file, it's a pain in the arse as you have to save the image across multiple CDs. Once you have the image saved in some fashion, you can revert the computer back to it's present state, even after you've loaded XP on it. There are fairly detailed tutorials on the web on how to do this with either program, so I'm not going into great detail. There are also "freeware" programs which claim to do the same, however I have no experience with them.

Todd

Wavetar,
Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I have another computer on the network, so to save the image somewhere other than the laptop's hard drive is not an issue.

Higgy

IMHO, the easiest way to back up a Windows drive now-a-days is to boot from CD into a Linux distribution (e.g. Knoppix), mount another machine on the network via Samba (using Windows file sharing on the other computer if it is a Windows machine), then copy the whole damn disk with the command

bzip2 </dev/hda >backup.bz2

(or possibly bzip2 </dev/sda >backup.bz2)

Which will give you a sector by sector image of the disk, compressed, so that it won't take up quite so much space.

When you need to restore it, you would just issue the command

bunzip2 <backup.bz2 >/dev/hda

and it is done.

In any case, you really cannot fully back up a Windows disk under Windows, due to the way Windows handles file sharing. No matter what you will be booting from some other media.

The other solution is to get a USB to IDE adapter such as this, remove the disk from the machine, and copy it that way.

Personally, I'd suggest you just buy another 2.5 inch disk for your laptop, and install XP to that, and keep the existing drive as a backup.

CloneZilla (google it) is a good, free, Linux-based alternative to Ghost and its ilk.

Wowbagger wrote: In any case, you really cannot fully back up a Windows disk under Windows, due to the way Windows handles file sharing. No matter what you will be booting from some other media.

You can indeed fully back up while running under Windows...done it many times with True Image. Unless you mean "restore", in which case yes, you use a bootable True Image disk to run the restore process.

Wowbagger wrote: Personally, I'd suggest you just buy another 2.5 inch disk for your laptop, and install XP to that, and keep the existing drive as a backup.

Yes, if the hard drive cost is reasonable, that's a good way to go as well.

Todd