I wish to partition my HDD and want to backup all applications and their corresponding setups such as skype, anti-virus software, etc. I have searched Google and found only one but it did not have a very high rating. Are there any other popular freeware that will do this?

Hi Jim Simon

and Welcome at Gladiators. Enjoy our forum.

Can you give us some more details about your system (OS, hardware related info)? Usually I'm using Clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/) for all kind of huge backups, creating images of drives.

Regards
B. Udo

I have an old Laptop compaq Presario 1200US with 316 RAM and 10 Gig HDD, a 100 GB USB external HDD and another 750 external HDD. I am using Windows XP Pro.

I read the url you sent me and I think the Live version would suffice my needs. Seems like a real nice package.


Thanks a lot.

I wish to save my C: drive to an external HDD. My external HDD is a FAT32 but it is not partitioned. Do I need to partition it before beginning to do the backup? If your answer is yes, since Clonezilla uses Linux HDD designations (hda1, hdb3, etc), how do I determine the correct Linux letter designation for my external HDD or any other (flash key, cd-rom, etc) in order to save the backup in that drive?

Hi Jim

sorry for replying now. Was busy with one of my servers. hba represents IDE drives, hda1 is the mater HDD. hdb is a slave mounted HDD. Usually CloneZilla tells you which drive it has found

Usually you do not need to partitionize the external drives. When running CloneZilla you're creating an image of your 10GB HDD which is like a large ZIP file. How to create such an image, please read the instructions here.

Another but German explanation how to use CloneZilla can be found here. It shows in step-by step charts what you have to do

ATTENTION: Make sure you're not activating the grub bootloader. If you're not removing the checkbox it'll might mess up your system!

If the created image isn't that huge you might write it on a CD or DVD as an additional backup.

Regards
B. Udo

I'm a bit behind also. Thanks for the info. If I have any more questions, I'll give a howler.