Making image backup of hard drive

I just got the XP Home version with the 120gig hard drive.
I want to make a image copy of the entire hard drive or just the recovery partition. I want to mess with installing ubuntu also, so before i try i want to make sure that i make a back up of the drive.
But i would need something like ghost that i could boot from a USB stick and then put the image to a USB hard drive.

Any help would be great

 

I use GHOST 11 and WinPE on USB key to make image.

how to make the key bootable with Windows PE.

http://www.svrops.com/svrops/articles/winvistape2.htm

 

Wow, thats a whole process.
i'll work on this at work where I have multiple machines running. Plus i'm seeing reports how Ubuntu still has some simple issues with the Aspire One.

 

I'm using Partimage, it comes with System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/).

 

Thanks for the tip. Im making small progress. I got the software to boot from USB stick. Now trying to figure out how to use Partimage to backup to an external drive.

 

I was able to make an image of the FAT32 eRecovery partition. I already had Acronis True Image and its capable of making a USB system recovery, not only CD's.

I boot it with the USB Stick and made the image copy of the recovery partition and placed it on a portable hard drive.

The only problem is that I have no way to really test it, except for wiping the drive on the Aspire One and recovering just the recovery partition and see if the computer can be restore to default setting.

I did load it on a regular SATA 3.5" drive on a desktop and the eRecovery bootup process came up but eventually got a blue screen. That's a good sign and I'm hoping that it crashed because it was not the Acer computer.

 

I used PING to make a 4gb image that I keep on a USB drive handy for when I mess up my xp install. It's really easy to use and free which is the best bit.

 

Hi,

I already damaged my recovery partition , and I was wondering, is there a place where I can download it from and recover it?

 

what did you do exactly? Check this thread. viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2843&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

 

Thaks for the link Jnetty99. This is what I was looking for.

What I did was: I copied the files from the recovery partition to c: with Partition Magic, then I changed the file system from FAT to NTFS and then I merged the two partitions. I did it because I prefer to have all my free space together, without really realizing that I will loose the possibility to recover my system. After this operation the system didn't boot. Currently I have installed regular XP home.

 

Another simple way to get to the hidden 6GB HDD partition that contains the eRecovery partition: http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2988&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=erecovery

Perform steps 1, 2 and 3 up to the part where you set the hidden partition to type 07 (NTFS) and save.

Then right click on My Computer (Computer in Vista), click Manage, get to the storage, find the hidden partition and perform "Rescan Disks". Now you can copy the file structure to a USB flash drive or external USB DVD.

Has anyone tested eRecovery from their USB flash drive or external DVD? (i.e., by clicking D2D32 icon).