HP, Compaq, eMachines, Gateway, ViewSonic, Alienware, Best Buy, MicroCenter, Dixon, ZT Group, Seneca Data, Tatung and many more are part of the SoftThinks family of OEMs. SoftThinks manufactures the program "P. C. Angel" installed on my computer. This is a one time run option to burn recovery disks to CD's or DVD's. It is an excellent and fast way to generate recovery disks. You just slide in blank disks and out pop recovery disks that will load the disk image onto a freshly formatted hard drive with all your tweaks - ready to go. I am trying to find a way to do this. Correct me if I am wrong but from what I can tell from reading, Norton Ghost & Acronis won't do this in such a nice "cut and dried" fashion. (If they will even do this at all.) It seems that the Ghost program has to be installed or involved somewhere to accomplish the re-installation. Whereas the "P. C. Angel" disks are stand alone and are self booting and self loading. I am not sure about Acronis though. Does anyone have any experience/suggestions for software that will do this as easily as "P. C. Angel" does? Thanks in advance.

I don't think there's anything out there as easy as that. Acronis is pretty cool though. You can create an image while the pc is booted up into Windows, so if you have an external hd, all you have to do after the sw is installed is tell it to make an image and put on the external drive. Actually, that might be easier. It's probably a toss up.

i have used norton ghost years ago ,you can install all you program and what ever and then install and used ghost to creat an image of hte drive ,

nlite?

will nlite make a bootable disk from the winxp install ,no winxp cd needed ??

no

Oh, my opinion that's what this poster is wanting to do !

its the best way though. An image like ghost etc... wont work if the motherboard gets swapped

it will if you uninstall chips set drives and remove IDE channel or something like that before you create it,it doesent detect the mothereboard or harddrives untill after it runs the first time .! ., i have a chost of winxp someone made and gave me a few years ago , with open office and free antivir and winzip trial,and some other software install and it had never failed me when i used it to install xp on different computers,so it can be done