[BNM] Creating a bootable DVD with Windows & Apps?

[Simon Atkinson]

Norton Ghost should do all you require.

-----Original Message-----
From: bnmlist-bounces at brightonnewmedia.org
[mailto:bnmlist-bounces at brightonnewmedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan
Hirsch
Sent: 22 January 2007 17:21
To: Brighton New Media
Subject: [BNM] Creating a bootable DVD with Windows & Apps?

Hi all,

Can anyone offer any advice on the following?

I have a just-retired PC laptop which I'm going to give to my other  
half to break, sorry, I mean use. Before I hand it over I intend to  
wipe the internal hard drive and restore it to its 'as new' state  
using the original system recovery CDs. I've backed up all my  
documents etc. but what I'd really like to do - just in case I have  
one of those 'sh*t I really need that application' moments a few  
months down the line (I'm on a Mac now) - is to keep a bootable copy  
of my entire drive, complete with all my apps etc., so that instead  
of having to re-install anything I may need, I can just borrow the  
machine back and boot it from an external drive.

I've successfully cloned the drive, but there's just one problem -  
the BIOS doesn't seem to offer any options for booting from an  
external hard drive (only for optical or floppy drives or from a  
network). D'oh! I downloaded the latest BIOS update, but no change.

So I'm wondering - is there a (preferably nice and easy) way to  
create a bootable DVD with just my system and a few of my  
applications? Looking at my WINDOWS folder, I'll need to strip things  
down a bit to have a hope of getting it on to one disk (or can a boot  
disk be split over several DVDs?) but assuming I manage that...  
Googling seems to show lots of stuff about ways of backing up just  
the system, or just documents, or both, or the entire drive, but I  
can't seem to find anything about creating a bootable backup of  just  
the system and applications.

Any advice or alternative suggestions much appreciated! Or am I  
barking up the wrong tree? Would I be better off just going and  
getting a replacement internal hard drive and keeping the old one  
somewhere safe? The machine's a Sony Vaio Z1 running Windows XP Pro,  
in case that makes a difference.

Oh, and just to make matters more complicated - the laptop only has a  
DVD reader, not a writer... ;-) But my Mac has a DVD writer, so  
hopefully if I can create a disk image on the PC, I can copy that  
across and burn it on the Mac. In theory...

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Jon


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