I just resurrected my weekend. If you don't have a disk imaging program, GET ONE. Windows decided to go down the tubes on me and what would have been an all weekend job to restore everything took 15 minutes.

Whassa disk imaging program and where can you get one? April Follies, who definitely sees the sense in this

Every one i know uses nortons " Ghost " I have used it a few times and it was pretty quick and easy .

Norton's Ghost is good, as is Powerquests Drive Image. I have used both, and really can't say which one I like better. Supposedly Drive Image is faster, but my tests don't bare that out. It doesn't appear to be any slower either.

Or carbon copy cloner if you are on the mac

so what does this do?

Creates a clone backup of your system, perfs and all, in case......

Attached Link: http://www.ntius.com/

I'm a Mac person and I'd never heard of cloners---so, thank you! And I think the Poser Forum is an appropriate place to post the info, since Poser's frequent crashes and hang-ups have resulted in (I am not making this up) 'panicked kernals'...... Whatever they are, they cause The Gray Screen Of Death and one of these days, I'm going to have to restore everything, and I will be blessing your name as I do ;)

Sounds like a good idea, but if there's something wrong with a configuration that would bring the whole system down (not hardware related), then I'd rather do a reformat and reinstall even if it takes all weekend. I do it anyway, at least twice a year.

It's turned out to be a better time investment to restore a KNOWN stable system in 15 minutes than to completely reload...but that's just my opinion. I only image the system "disk" when I'm satisfied with it's stability. In this instance, I believe I have a random hardware thing going on that brought WinXP down this time (system restore has been unreliable). A few other configuration points that makes this easy for me: - WinXP is on a partition all by itself, nothing else touches it. - I load ALL applications on a separate partition. - I keep ALL data on a separate partition. With this configuration, all I have to restore is the C: drive and I'm back in business. If there were any apps that I loaded since the last image, I would have had to reload those too...if they required the registry. Oh, I do data backups on CD-R...because it's easier than trying to extract a single file from a disk image.

"Re: OT but something you really should do FREQUENTLY" I thought you were going to say "pee"..heheh But seriously Pablo, which imaging program did you use?

Dizzie, I've been using Norton's Ghost. It will image a drive straight to CD-Rs and make 'em bootable. "I thought you were going to say 'pee'..heheh" LOL...I'm glad you didn't mention other possible body functions!

LOLOLOL..if I were constipated I might of thought of another, but today is a good day...heheheh Thanks for the info!