8. Restore the image.
No backup solution is complete unless you *know* that you can actually recover the files from your images. Until you know that you can restore your files, your new image isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit. Yes, I said spit. Let’s ensure that your new backup is working, shall we? You DID back up your files originally, right?
Boot from the BartPE live CD and launch DriveImage XML. Insert any media that contains your backup image. Click “Restore” on the left side and start following the wizard again. Choose the XML file that you want to restore. For my purposes, I chose to restore the image from its location on my second hard drive, though I could also have inserted the DVD-R containing the image into my second optical drive. [See full screenshot]
Next, select the drive or partition to which you want to restore. If this is a new hard drive that does not yet have any partitions, DriveImage XML also gives you the option to launch the “Windows Disk Management” utility, which you can use to create a new partition. You will have to confirm your choice a couple of times, and the final time you actually have to type a few characters into a text box and then click OK. When you have ensured that the correct image is going to restore to the correct partition, cross your fingers and click OK. Here goes! [See full screenshot]
Now watch helplessly as all of your files are erased… and hopefully restored with the files in your image. Believe it or not, it only took my computer exactly 8 minutes and 40 seconds to restore the image. [See full screenshot]
When it is finished, reboot and remove the live CD. If your system comes back to life, congratulations, you have successfully implemented an image/restore backup system, all for free. If your system exploded or drank all of the soy nog in your refrigerator, I offer my condolences. Re-read the instructions, and better luck next time.
9. Alternatives and asides.
Though this entire process may seem much more complicated than a commercial equivalent like Symantec Ghost, it really is not. From this point on, all I have to do when I want to backup my system is to run DriveImage XML from my system drive to create an image. If I ever need to restore from it, I simply boot my live CD and restore the image. There’s no more slipstreaming or building live CDs. I’ve never used Norton Ghost(tm) or any other paid backup solution, so I cannot draw a direct feature comparison.
While DriveImage XML offers a lot for free, I do have some suggested improvements. I’d like to see a way to automate a time schedule for creating backup images, such as “every Sunday at 11 PM.” I’d also love the ability to specify the size of the “split large files” option instead of just defaulting to 656 MB. Specifically, DVD-sized chunks would be great.
Of course, this is only one way to achieve the results for free. I am sure that there are other free imaging utilities, some of which may even integrate with BartPE or another live CD environment, but this is what I found that works for me. While another option would be to boot a Linux live CD and use a tool such as Mondo Rescue, using a Windows live CD simplifies matters in that I am guaranteed to have full NTFS write support.
Before any DOS purists attack me stating that Windows XP does indeed have a cloning utility called “xcopy”, let me say this. If you can prove to me that xcopy is as versatile and easy to use as DriveImage XML and can do everything that I’ve listed in this article, I’m all ears. Deciphering all those switches is not my cup of tea.
That said, I leave the door open for anyone to tell me an alternate way to create an image/restore backup system like the one I have described for free. We can all benefit from that kind of knowledge. Please do not tell me that “such-and-such program has a free 30-day trial.” That does not count.
Good luck, and happy backups.
—- Brian Bondari —-
© 2005
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I am a customer support engineer where I will be handling lot of calls regarding reinstallation on multiple pc’s based on intel as well as AMD. is there any way I can use this software to prepare a common image which in both platforms or atleast in multiple configuration systems of intel and amd
Stay away from DriveImage XML! IT JUST DON’T WORK! I’m trying to restore a customer Image and it gives de “>” tag error. I manually corrected the corrupted xml chunk full of random harddrive data and the program is unable to restore. So they will say I’ve done something wrong? I’ve searched webs and everybody just gets the “>” problem and nobody gives any solution. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT YOU BACKUP SUCCESSFULLY AND THEN YOU ARE UNABLE TO RESTORE? Hopefully I’ve noticed it in a transfer and not in a disaster recovery scenario.
Thank you so much for the screen shots, I had restored my disk a couple of ways to a USB stick, across a wireless network, and copied the files around to other disk. I would try to get disk restore or disk copy to work and would get hung on that confirm overwrite screen. My overwrite screen had just partial information, then I finally found this site and your screen shot, I entered the disk# info and it took off. I spent days on the net trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. This stuff is slick, even without the support, I tried other cloning software, this stuff worked the fastest. By the way I used Hiren bootCD, I have a couple of pc’s that people gave to me, thus I have no installation media, which all the other boot cd creation schemes need. The only problem I had using the Hiren is that it didn’t have my Ethernet driver.
Ok. The other day my OS basically decided to die on me for no apparent reason, so I thought “Great! I have an Xml drive image, I’ll just back it up!”.
So, I booted the Bart PE builder disk, worked fine. Went to restore the image, worked fine.
Time to complete restore…10 hours! Yes, it actually took 10 hours to restore the image. It worked, but in your guide you said it took about 10 minutes…
I was restoring the C: drive from an image stored on another partition. Does this drastically slow things down?
OS is restored and working peferctly again. No idea why the restore was so slow. Any insight would be appreciated.
Hi JohnM
Yes, it would be quicker if you had your image to restore on a USB drive.
I’m getting an error when i try to restore an xml drive image to a secondary drive.
ERROR MESSAGE: Missing”>”in close tag of element bitmapitem
The pc has three (3) drives and i’m trying to restore the image to the third drive which has been partitioned and made active. the original drive was SATA and i’m trying to write to an IDE drive…does this matter???
HELP!!!!!
itz really great
Hi everyone.
I tried doing this but it didnt work.
I want to be able to clone my computer using driveimage onto an external harddrive of mine, so that i can boot from it, and have literally 2 copies of my computer. i used the drive-to-drive feature of driveimage as well as restoring a backup image onto the external hd, but neither worked. it says in the HELP of driveimage that “the boot partition should be located on the first drive (DISK0), which is usually the master drive.” and mine isnt, its on DISK2, disk0 is my main computer disk.
so IS it possible to restore an image to my external hd so i can boot from it?
thanks guys.
ps: great tutorial.