Hi guys - thought I'd share.
I'm preparing to do an in place upgrade of my main PC (Vista) to Win 7, and wanted to make a reliable image of my system so that I can restore if anything goes wrong.
I use a 64 Bit OS, which rules out many imaging programs, and even those that claim to be 64bit compatible failed miserably to successfully create an image. I was almost resigned to having to pay for commercial backup software, when I came across PING (http://ping.windowsdream.com/).
This is free, open source. It's Linux based and you download an ISO, burn it to CD and boot from it. Don't panic about it being Linux based - it worked flawlessly on a test backup and restore of PC2 (backing up over the network in that case). Maybe a bit slow - the test backup too 38 minutes to backup, and 20 minutes to restore a 9Gb OS (a relatively clean install of Win 7), and the backup of my main system took 3 hours (100Gb).
Simple to use, with a complete walkthrough in the online documentation. The only thing worth mentioning is if you are going to backup to a shared folder on another machine, read the prerequisites in the documentation first - you need to install the directory structure on the target PC.
Backing up to a local HD is pretty much "just do it".
I highly recommend this.
Steve :thumb:
Nice find Steve
Karmic find, Steve. :thumb:
As an aside, apart from a couple of niggles (took a couple of goes to get my gfx card drivers working, and the version of Nvidia ethernet drivers I was using won't play with Win 7, and one or two other small niggles - for example the upgrade advisor never mentioned Comodo firewall, but it would have worked much better if I'd uninstalled first - I finished up having to uninstall and re-install anyway) the Upgrade seems to have gone OK. Took about three hours, and a couple more hours working past these problems, but still a hell of a lot less time and trouble than a clean install would have been.
I'll keep the full system disk image for a little time yet, though - just in case :fingers:
Steve