NeutralAxis

After any new computer purchase, I always use whatever means is offered to make restoration discs since none of the manufacturer’s include them anymore.  But restoration discs actually aren’t enough to get you back to square one in all circumstances, such as if you have to replace a hard drive.  That’s where an actual drive image comes in handy.  Norton Ghost is a common commercial program that can do this.  If you don’t want to spend the money, give Clonezilla a try.  Unfortunately, its not particularly user friendly.

Both Acer and Gateway computers come with a Windows utility for making restore discs.  I’m sure other makes do as well.  You may be prompted shortly after booting up a new computer that you should make your restore discs.  If you get prompted, do it.  If you don’t get prompted, find the utility and start it yourself.  On Acer and Gateway there’s a group in the Programs list called Acer (or Gateway) and in that is an eRecovery program.  It will give you the option to create factory restore discs or application/driver restore discs.  I usually make both.  For my new Gateway, it took 4 DVDs and about 20 minutes each to create them.

The problem with these restore discs, is that they only restore the main partition where your C drive resides.  There are other partitions on your drive and if you had to replace a hard drive, the restore discs won’t recreate those.  That’s where Clonezilla comes in.

Clonezilla is a free utility that can image Windows and Linux file systems.  There’s no installation necessary, it simply runs from a bootable CD.  There’s more than one version and you’ll want Clonezilla Live.  To run it, you first need to download its ISO, burn the ISO to a CD or a USB stick and then boot your computer from it.  If you’re not comfortable doing any of that, you won’t be comfortable with any of the rest of this procedure, so stop here and buy a copy of Norton Ghost.  It will do the same thing in a friendlier fashion.  I only have a very few acquaintances I’d recommend try this on their own.  Its actually not hard, but its definitely intimidating.  These procedures worked for me, but proceed at your own risk.

After you boot from the Clonezilla CD you’ll see this.

It will give you several seconds to make a choice, or it will go with one of the defaults.  Choose one of the first 3 choices, depending on your monitor’s resolution ability.

Next, you’ll get a couple of choices for language and keyboard.

Next, you’ll choose to start Clonezilla

Next, you’ll choose if you want to create an image, or copy directly from device to device.  For the purpose I’m describing in this post, you’ll just create an image file.

Then you’ll choose where the image will be saved.  You can choose a local drive other than the one you’re backing up, an external drive, or a network location.  When I backed up my Acer AspireRevo, I did it via network.  With my Gateway EC5801u, Clonezilla wasn’t able to get a network connection established so I just saved directly to an external USB drive.

At that point, it will scan your system looking for attached drives.  You want to choose the DESTINATION drive.  I’m doing this demo in a Virtualbox, so you see a 8GB Sandisk USB stick, and a 4.8GB Virtualbox drive.  I’m wanting to backup the Vbox drive to the Sandisk, so I’ll choose the Sandisk drive.  Be careful at this step.  You don’t want to choose the wrong one and overwrite what you’re trying to backup.

Instructions continued on the next page.