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Daniel Payne
Our home has 4 computers running Windows 8, no hitches (yet). Three of them were ...
David Brown
The big trouble is that if he installs Linux and then still has to re-install ...
Need to clone Windows 8 – help!
Brian Bailey
1/17/2013 2:24 PM EST
My woes with Windows 8 continue, and I know that I haven’t even told you about some of the recent adventures yet, but I will. Basically I am now on my fourth install of everything and each time something has happened to totally destroy the running system. Some of them are hardware failure, some because of Microsoft and their determination to stop me from setting up the system the way I want it to operate (I don’t think I am trying to do anything unreasonable and desires shared by a large majority of the desktop community), and some from following bad advice from random people on the Internet (Yes, all mothers should warn people about this bad and dangerous habit).
In order to try and stop this from happening again, I want to create an image of my system drive so that if any of this happens again I will be able to restore everything. I am not just meaning a registry backup and already that has proven to be unreliable with Windows 8 as I tried this once and the registry was corrupt – or so it says. I want to create a complete bootable image. I did even buy some software to do this, and perhaps made the mistake of buying the one that, with a mail in rebate, was free. That was Laplink and basically the clone it created did not work and I had been relying on that to save me and found out that it didn’t.
Any advice from people out there? Do you know of something that works – reliably – for Windows 8?
Brian Bailey – keeping you covered
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Max the Magnificent
1/17/2013 3:40 PM EST
O Brian ... it seems like only yesterday that I was reading your blog singing the praises of Windows 8 and poking fun at those of us who had said otherwise ( http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-blogs/maxs-cool-beans-blog/4402814/Don-t-talk-to-me-about-Windows-8- )
Not that I'm gloating ... I hope you get up and running again ASAP -- Max
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David Ashton
1/17/2013 4:22 PM EST
"Any advice from people out there? Do you know of something that works – reliably – for Windows 8?"
Junk it and go back to W7 :-)
Or do as I do, never use a Windows OS till it's at least 2 generations out of date. I'm still on XP (which causes Max to poke fun at ME.... :-)
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BrianBailey
1/17/2013 4:24 PM EST
I know. This is turning into a nightmare and I am sick and tired of wasting so much time on it rather than actually doing some work!
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rfindley
1/18/2013 2:28 PM EST
Brian, I use ShadowProtect (by StorageCraft). It can restore to 'bare-metal', or you can even run your backup as a virtual machine on another machine (even if that machine has different hardware features). This came in really handy when I had to send in my laptop for repair after a lightning strike.
It uses 'shadowing' to maintain the backup, so it is very non-intrusive to use the computer while backup is in progress. Mine does incremental backup every hour, and full backup once a week. I forget it's even there.
I should mention... I'm not running Windows 8, but they claim Windows 8 support.
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bblack
1/19/2013 7:57 AM EST
Why not switch to Linux?
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BrianBailey
1/19/2013 1:47 PM EST
Too much of my work relies on Office and OpenOffice does not work well enough especially when dealing with files with changes embedded in them. Also many of the applications I use are not supported on Linux. If this were an option, I would have made the jump a long time ago.
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David Brown
1/21/2013 1:07 PM EST
Before giving up on OpenOffice, make sure you try LibreOffice. It is much better than OpenOffice for compatibility with MS's software. It's not always perfect, but it is generally very close - and has some useful features that are missing in MS Office.
As for other software - I could not do my work without a Windows machine, but equally I could not do my work without a Linux machine. And a lot of what I do can work on either platform - but generally much better on Linux.
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David Brown
1/21/2013 1:09 PM EST
The big trouble is that if he installs Linux and then still has to re-install Windows, he will realise how appalling the Windows installation process is!
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Phil16v
1/19/2013 12:38 PM EST
You could try CloneZilla. It's Linux based, it will create or restore an image of your hard disk, and as it boots from the DVD/CD drive on your system, it doesn't matter what state your system is in. www.clonezilla.org
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BrianBailey
1/19/2013 1:45 PM EST
Thanks. I will certainly give that a try and report back!
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BrianBailey
1/21/2013 11:05 AM EST
Worked like a charm. Thank you!!
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Daniel Payne
1/22/2013 11:26 AM EST
Our home has 4 computers running Windows 8, no hitches (yet). Three of them were upgrades from Windows 7 to Windows 7, the fourth cam with Windows 8 installed. I'm running Windows 8 on a MacBook Pro, thanks to virtualization software from Parallels. At least with Mac OS X I can make my own Image, although it's not well documented by Apple, and have the Image on a USB stick just in case I ever need it. The other two Windows 7 systems were custom-built PCs for gaming, and they had no issues upgrading to Windows 8.
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