Partimage Party
I’ve been re-installing Windows today so that I can play Morrowind. Being as installing Windows XP is as pleasant as amputating your own arm with a rusty teaspoon, I’ve created my own restore partition using Knoppix.
The first time I tried to create an image it was a failure, I installed the windows on NTFS and partimage support for that is untested (and the imaging caused a blue screen on boot). So I reinstalled Windows with the main partition on FAT32.
It works well. I now have an image containing Windows XP Home SP2 with Outlook Express and Windows Messenger removed and Firefox and Thunderbird added in.
Creating an image was as simple as:
partimage -z2 save /dev/hda1 windows_xp_image.bz
If there isn’t already one someone should make a tiny Linux distro for restoring stuff. It could boot from CD, create a partition to store a windows image and itself and give boot loader options, “Windows” and “Fix Windows”, it could also have the option of burning the partition image to a bootable DVD along with enough stuff to restore the image.