An easier way of reinstalling your O/S re activation

[tornado33]

With XP and on, MS make us have to Activate it, and ig your re install it too many times it knocks you back, you can then ring the MS Australia number and they can give you another code to get it going again, as a user is allowed to reinstall windows on the same system as often as they like.

However I thought of using an old DOS version of Norton Ghost I have, on a CD rom boot disc. When I got my new PC up and running and Vista activated I then ghosted the drive into a compressed Ghost image file on another drive. Today I tested it by putting in a black HDD, and again booting off the Ghost DOS disc, restoring the ghost image onto the black drive, then setting the PC to boot from that drive and PRESTO, a fresh installation of Vista, activated with drivers installed, in the exact same state as when I ghosted it. Its perfectly legal to do as well, as youre simply using it to reinstall in the same system, in fact it cannot be used on a different system as its all set to run on the original system.

The important thing is the process of ghosting, and restoring, happen out of the Windows enviroment, it happens in a simple DOS enviroment, and yes it even detects all my SATA2 drives. As a backup Ive even burnt the ghost image onto a DL DVD (as its over 5gb in size)
Scott

[RB]

Yep nice one Scott, I've been doing the same thing using Acronis True Image 11. (http://www.acronis.com.au/homecomputing/products/trueimage/?source=au_google&ad=ati&gclid=CKz29P39u5QCFRMYagodQ1FITg)
In fact that is how I back up my system, I plug in my spare HDD via USB external box and image the whole drive around every month or so (sometimes earlier).
Recently I upgraded to a larger C Drive by this method.
Works a treat.

[tornado33]

yep it sure does. Upgrading to a bigger drive this way means you dont have to reinstall Windows :)
Scott

[Tandum]

Most Gigabyte motherboards have a similar backup built into bios. They call it Xpress Recovery2. It allows you to image the OS to a partition and you get a restore option shown on screen during boot. The partition needs to be big enough to hold the image though.

[tornado33]

Thats a very useful option :)
Scott

[helioz]

The method described in this tread works for backups which are re-installed onto the same hardware. If you discard your old PC and you want to install the ghosted image onto another PC you will need to re-license.

[Tandum]

That depends ....you get to change 3 items before you have to re-activate.

But yes, If I replaced hardware, I'd expect to re validate.

I do have a tool that does that function without internet :)