hi i want to make an windows 7 system image before installing SP1, there is an built-in image maker in windows 7 but i read about it somewhere that it can't keep ur activation intact. so my issue is that i want to keep my activation of windows 7 too with the image. kindly help me on this issue. thnx
Start with 7's built-in imager ... Backup and Restore. It's right there, it's simple, it's fast and it works very well. If that does what you want then stop. If you want more, try all the others.
confirm that, with the built 7 image creator, you keep everything, done twice with excellent results, moreover if you have a few partition when you create image, than you change it, after image restore it will ask if you want keep existnig o recreate last....... Important tip, save it in a ext HD on root directory, otherwise it will not find image(the program is searching a folder windowsimgbackup in the root directory, if you put in a different directory, no way...... nice goin
Mainly use sysprep? Sure if you like and understand that stuff, but you cant just sysprep, you also need to capture the image. Thats where an image made with acronis is better.
Very true. You can change the name though and create multiple images each with different properties, and store them in a different folder, partition or drive. I do that for installations with different versions of office for instance. To restore, copy a version back to the root directory and rename it to the default name. In my case I have one that is WindowsImageBackup[Office 2010]. Just remove the "[Office 2010]" part and 7 will recognize it.
thnx ok i have two partitions C: is 50GB and D: is 248GB, i dont want to delete any thing from D:, if i format only C: (D: has data in it) and start with Windows Recovery disc CD/DVD and restore image on C: only, could i do that and D: drives data will be untoched ???
Yes acronis is excellent but remember to also make backup to other hard drive or dvd's, recovery partition is no good if hard drive fails.
very sorry for the inconvenience i made image of only Win7 system partition i.e. C: , from my 320GB HDD (image made by Acronis also made a recovery bootable disc from Acronis) then i applied it on my other 500GB HDD C: partition but when windows 7 starts it shows blue screen and then restart itself and shows Repair System from Recovery Disc(windows recovery disc). help plz thnx
few weeks ago my win7 got corrupted really bad i tried many solutions but they didn't work (at that time i could see 100mb partition) but when i reformatted and install a fresh copy of win7, i couldn't see 100mb partition.
If you have a good system image of C:, and a bootable repair CD, you don't really need the recovery partition. You can keep a system image on the same physical drive on which Windows 7 resides but in a different partition from C:. Windows 7 will complain about an image being on the same physical drive as 7, but so is the recovery partition on a laptop or netbook. It is; however, best to keep the image on a physical drive different from the one C: is on.
i made winxp image from my 500GB HDD(using Aconis) and it was successfully applied on same HDD, same partition. my question is, if i made win7 image from 320GB HDD, can it be applied on 500GB HD ???
is it necessary that HDD should be RAW(there shouldn't be any partition), if i am restoring an image from small size HDD to larger one ???