CAM said:
Thanks - I have gotten Treu image and that will work BUT I still have
the NTbackup help locking up. Any suggestions for this?
CAM said:
I am succcesfully using NTbackup to back up the system sate and
documents and
settings to an external hard drive but cannot get the Help to work
consistantly. Before I am able to get to the topic I want it is
"not responding" and I have to close the application. How can I
correct this? I
want to know if copying "All information on this computer" is
equivalent to a
disk copy of the hard drive. I suspect that it is not.
It isn't remotely useful in this way. It's more misleading that
useful.
If not, how do I go
about getting a backup copy of the hard drive?
Get a decent disk imaging program like Acronis TrueImage, which will
provide you with a disk image you can transfer to another drive and
make bootable in short order.
HTH
-pk
Congrats on sticking to your point <g>. About the only advice I have
unfortunately would be to do a Repair Install of XP so that none of your
data will be disturbed. IMO you're wise to look further into this since the
symptom you see may likely be only one of many possible scenarios. Too many
people jump to bandaids and just ignore the underlying problems, and then
regret it later.
This could be as simple as some repairable table corruption on the disk.
Have you run chkdsk on that drive? If not, I'd suggest doing it first.
CHKDSK /r is the best option to use. chkdsk /?at the command prompt will
get you a list of the options if you're curious. The /r will try to recover
data from any bad sectors it finds where /f will not.
Since it's the boot disk, chkdsk will ask you to delay the chkdsk to the
next boot; let it, and then do a Restart. Chkdsk will run upon bootup.
"All information on this computer" and a "disk copy" are a couple of those
terms that can mean different things to different people. All Information
On This Computer would be a copy of the disk, which in turn can be a disk
copy operation. If however Disk Copy means putting everything back into the
same sectors/blocks on the hard disk, no, it won't do that. Everything will
be put back, but it will be put back contiguously as opposed to in the same
order it came off in. With some few exceptions that are important to the
OS.
All Information will also create the Recovery Disks required to recover
from a catastrophic failure of the drive where it becomes totally unusable.
It IS the right choice if I understand you correctly.
It's not clear to me whether you're saying the Help freezes, whether you're
using the backup Wizards, etc., so I'm guessing a little at how to respond
here. You might also try Help & Support to see if the info you need is
located there; it likey is, or on the 'net if you let it use the 'net for
its searches.
Here's one link on the subject of a Repair Install: There are others:
http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
Basically, I find that if I boot from the CD, then look for the SECOND "R"
choice, that's the Repair Install. The first one only goes to a command
prompt for TS'ing.
If for some reason the second R isn't there, then something's made a
repair impossible that way so I go to that link. Actually only used it
once.
In the event you have the few bucks it takes to get Norton's Ghost or
Acronis True Image, they ARE more efficient solutions, but at the moment
they might be only band aids that could bite you on the ass later on if
there's a corruption or malware causing problems. Unless you're the real
geeky type I don't recommend BootItNG; it's good, but kind of techie.
Personally I'm using Norton's Ghost 10.
HTH
Pop`
