Creating a Bootable Disc of the Whole Hard Drive

I have a seven year old Dell PC (Specs: Intel Celeron (R ) CPU 2.40Ghz, 149Gb hard drive, 512 Mb RAM.).

I'm hoping to get another year or two out of it before replacing it, so I'm in the process of rebuilding it, after picking up a virus.

Once I have it back to where I want it - i.e. Windows XP sp3 installed (old, but I need the OS
to match the OS at work), Office 2003, a few other pieces of software - I'd like to copy
the whole hard drive to a disc of some sort (I'm assuming DVD, based on the size?) that I
could just use to return everything back to the same state, should I need to.

I don't need/want to back up documents, files, etc. as I already have a system in place for that. I just want to be able to quickly and easily return the system to a point where I can work on it again without needing to manually install each separate piece of software.

Is there an easy way to create a disk of this sort? Can it be created such that the PC will boot form it in the same way it would Windows CD? How expensive does this need to be?

Any advice gratefully received.

Reply

That's actually a really great idea. Most of the time businesses will buy all the same computers for that exact reason. The answer is simple, get a program called Norton Ghost. You make an exact replica of the partition to a DVD-R which you can make bootable. Then, when you need to restore, you simply boot off of the DVD and your computer is exactly the same way you had it.

The only down side to this is when dealing with Windows Vista or Windows 7, the master boot record doesn't get copied which creates the need for another program to do so. But since you're using Windows XP, you won't this problem.

If you're wondering the time frame. The typical reinstall via a ghost method, a good written DVD is about 15 min start to finish.