I need a program that does this....

[El_Brio]

OK. Well as some of you may know, I switched to XP last week. Man what a headache. After realizing that all of the time I spent troubleshooting it was to make it function as well as 98SE did I decided to go back to 98. You all know how big of a pain this is to do a clean reformat and install.

In any case several hours later I have 98 working perfectly. Bios update, all new drivers, chipset update, network connection set up. EVERYTHING IS PERFECT.

Unfortunately we all know that in 98 tings don't stay that way for long.

What I need is software that does the following:

____I want to use my CD burner to make a bootable recovery disk of my system in it's perfectly configured state so I can restore it if I need to.____

I want to simply put the disk in the drive and EVERYTHING comes to exactally the state it is now. I used windows backup to make a backup file but it doesn't appear bootable.

Please help me. I have been sitting at this **** keyboard for the last week messing with setting up/uninstalling/setting up my OS and I don't want to do it again.

As always, thank you

EL_BRIO

PS ---- XP sucks ***!!! Works almost as good as 98 but takes up 5 times as much system resources. Slow. Plus you need a registry hack to do almost every bit of tweaking you need to do. Screw it. I will use 98 til I die.

[ironik311]

Here is a decent link to making your own bootable CD. It includes links to software to create that bootable CD and a step-by-step process. It may not be what you are after (if you are after that all in one piece of software that will restore everything) but it may be the right step.
http://goldentimes.net/bootcd01.htm

[El_Brio]

Nah. Thats not gonna do it. Doesn't norton make something like this called system restore or something?

[Kurylo]

I know that Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 can make custom bootable CD's.

[clubturbo]

Hello, sorry you had stuff go worng with XP,

W98 is a bit dated, but it does work,
I had 98 dual booted with W2K, but 98se
started to fall behind in software for my net work..

I have XP pro now too , windows 2000/XP is a much
safer OS, plus Its ezer to run in the log run,

If you can spend the time, get to know XP some,
there is alot of good info around,
It works vary nicely given the chance,


The backups your looking for can be done with
98SE backup files saved on a none system partiton,
then should the OS crash, you have the backup on
the none boot partition,

I use W2K and XP, both get backed up across my LAN,

But thay work 100 %. 98SE lacks the needed
back up and restore of the NT software ( W2K, XP )


anyways, back to the MCSE studys

Have fun a good luck

[Gobi]

Hi there!

It sounds like what you are needing is a "image" of
your harddrive. There is a lot of programs that can do
this, but my favorite is "Norton Ghost" (I think thats the name?)
It takes a snapshot of your harddrive, settings, etc and
stores it in a file. When you then want to go back to the
original system, just insert the cd-rom and in some time
it is all up and running again.
Big corporations uses this when they are rolling out
new pc's to their employees. They make one 'Master PC',
takes a copy, and then distributes it to the new pc's that
are going to be installed.

I can probably get you some links to where to find sutch
software if you want to. Please send me an PM and I'll
check with some friends.

Later
Gobi.

[BBB]

Hi,

I also think that Ghost can be a good solution. Once you setup your system and you are happy with it, just make an image of system disk (by using Ghost) and you can restore it at any time later. Of course it is not going to be bootable CD but you can boot from floppy and then run Ghost to restore system disk.

/BBB

[kazuza]

You can do both!
Make a image disk of that partition on another spare partition (borrow a disk)!
Any decent burning software allows you to create a bootable disk.
Select that option and the software will ask you for a bootable disk image file.
Insert your emergency boot disk and let it copy the necessary files.
Place your image disk in that session (compress it if you have to, or span it across several cd's).
If you want, you can automate the restore by ading command line prompt.
Read a Ghost manual!
It isn't so hard, is it?