Best way to restore laptops and netbooks with no DVD/CD drive?

[Perryg114]

I was wondering what is the best way to restore hard drive images on computers that don't have their own optical drive?

I suppose one way is to use an external drive and hope it will boot from that but I don't have an external optical drive.

I suppose you could install the drive in a desktop machine and clone it over that way using Acronis Trueimage or something like that.

Another issue is how to install software? Is there any reason you can't hook the laptop to your network and install from an optical drive on another computer? I guess you could use deamon tools to mount an ISO image of a software disk.

Anymore ideas are welcome. This is just my first cut at it.

Perry

 

[yinan]

PXE boot from a WDS server. Installing software is an easy one, just connect to a network share.

 

[Perryg114]

I was able to install from a CD drive on a network machine onto my wifes netbook. Doing a recovery will be harder and will most likely require me to physically remove the drive and put it in a desktop machine. One of those USB adapters might make like a little easier.

Perry

 

[Rafael]

Or you could do from a usb pendrive or something like that.

Just open the command prompt (Has to be in Windows Vista or 7)
And do the following commands:
DISKPART
LIST DISK (note the number of your USB drive at this point)
SELECT DISK X (X is the drive number you noted above)
CLEAN
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
SELECT PARTITION 1
ACTIVE
FORMAT FS=NTFS
ASSIGN
EXIT

It will make the pendrive as bootable partition, even if you format the pendrive.

Then just copy the windows installation files to the pendrive.

Hope this helps you out!