Previously, I've had a multi-boot setup on my machine, with boot volumes for both Windows XP Pro and Kubuntu 7.04.
Windows XP has a tendency to accumulate junk over time, and start crashing mysteriously, making a periodic reinstallation desirable. However, it's pure torture, and a huge waste of time, to have to reinstall every stinking driver and application all over again, every time.
What I'd prefer to do is, make an image of the Windows boot volume with everything I like installed and configured just the way I want it, then stow this image somewhere else on the system. Then, when I need to "reinstall" Windows I'd just overwrite the boot disk with the image, resulting in a fresh Windows boot volume.
Would a Kubuntu install be suitable for this purpose? I assume I could boot into Kubuntu, run a drive imaging utility, such as partimage, storing the image in e.g. the /home partition of my Kubuntu drive. When I want to restore the image, I would boot into Kubuntu and do it.
Is it really that easy? I understand imaging drives in theory, but have yet to make it work. I haven't had any luck with the various live CD/DVD tools, such as Clonezilla and gparted. Clonezilla doesn't like something about my hardware, as it refuses to mount the Windows XP boot volume for imaging. gparted insists on booting into a ridiculously high resolution with a very low refresh rate, resulting in a fuzzy, flickery image, with the window for partimage coming up way too small to read.
I'm also wondering how long it would take to image a drive, or restore it. This system is fairly old hardware, an Athlon XP 3200 with "only" 1 GB DDR RAM.
The hard drives are:
160 GB SATA 1.0 drive (partitioned, includes Windows boot volume, aka "C:", which is only 20 GB)
300 GB SATA 1.0 drive (data)
80 GB IDE drive (Kubuntu installation, with lots of room to spare)
Windows XP has a tendency to accumulate junk over time, and start crashing mysteriously, making a periodic reinstallation desirable. However, it's pure torture, and a huge waste of time, to have to reinstall every stinking driver and application all over again, every time.
What I'd prefer to do is, make an image of the Windows boot volume with everything I like installed and configured just the way I want it, then stow this image somewhere else on the system. Then, when I need to "reinstall" Windows I'd just overwrite the boot disk with the image, resulting in a fresh Windows boot volume.
Would a Kubuntu install be suitable for this purpose? I assume I could boot into Kubuntu, run a drive imaging utility, such as partimage, storing the image in e.g. the /home partition of my Kubuntu drive. When I want to restore the image, I would boot into Kubuntu and do it.
Is it really that easy? I understand imaging drives in theory, but have yet to make it work. I haven't had any luck with the various live CD/DVD tools, such as Clonezilla and gparted. Clonezilla doesn't like something about my hardware, as it refuses to mount the Windows XP boot volume for imaging. gparted insists on booting into a ridiculously high resolution with a very low refresh rate, resulting in a fuzzy, flickery image, with the window for partimage coming up way too small to read.
I'm also wondering how long it would take to image a drive, or restore it. This system is fairly old hardware, an Athlon XP 3200 with "only" 1 GB DDR RAM.
The hard drives are:
160 GB SATA 1.0 drive (partitioned, includes Windows boot volume, aka "C:", which is only 20 GB)
300 GB SATA 1.0 drive (data)
80 GB IDE drive (Kubuntu installation, with lots of room to spare)
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