Making a recovery CD

[Motero]

I have made several PCs for people...and have recently been asked about possibly making a recovery cd for them. Does anyone have any info on this? I guess I am thinking of making a cd that will boot, and reformat the drive as well as ask for a Windows CD when it needs. Any help appreciated.

 

[johnjkr1]

Why not just make a bootable ghost image of the pc when you give it to them? That way, when they run it it will fomat and install the OS all in one nice easy process

 

[gurpstar]

"Bart's PE Builder helps you build a "BartPE" (Bart Preinstalled Environment) bootable Windows CD-Rom or DVD from the original Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 installation/setup CD, very suitable for PC maintenance tasks."

BartPE Builder Download

That help?

 

[Motero]

johnjkr1: Do you want to give me an example? I'm not exactly sure what you are thinking...I'm thinking there is a program that would basically make an image of sorts when I'm finished building the system...


gurpstar: That doesn't appear to be exactly the correct thing. Not really sure what that is though.

 

[johnjkr1]

Sure, here is how I did it awhile back.

I got a new computer, I loaded the OS, installed all the necessary drivers and OS updates (i didnt install office, acrobat, games, etc to keep the image a bit smaller). Then, I used Ghost to create an image of the drive and stored it on an extra hard drive. I then burned that image onto a cd. To test it, I formatted the hard drive, took a ghost boot disk, booted to it, ghosted over the image, and everything was the same. The programs are better these days, they can create an image for you and break it up onto multiple bootable CD's if necessary.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

I do the ghost image thing myself on the pc's I sell to family/church/etc.