Making a Custom Recovery Disc

[jmr]

I'm planning on formatting my hard drive in the near future, and I know I'm going to end up re-installing quite a collection of software when I'm finished.

Since I know that I'm going to be formatting again in the future, I'd like to make the process easier for the next time. I'm wondering if anyone knows of any (preferably free) software for Windows XP that allows me to create a disc image of my hard drive and burn it to a DVD which can be used to restore the hard drive to that state.

[IckesTheSane]

I'm not sure if you could find it for free, but Norton Ghost does exactly what you are looking for. Format the drive, install OS, updates, whatever programs to get your computer just right, then create an image using that. If something happens to the OS, hard drive, or something else, you just reload the image and your computer will be the same as the day you made the image.

A quick search came up with a norton trial:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Norton_Ghost_d4842.html

15 days...

or the wikipedia entry, with a good list of programs at the bottom:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_cloning

When using ghost, you can't be "running" the disk you are trying to clone/image/copy, so you'll either need to put that disk as a second drive in another computer, or create some kind of bootable CD, such as MS Windows XPE, or Bart PE. Maybe some of the programs listed will make a boot CD? I also don't think you can save the image to the disk you are making the image of.

Good luck!