Member Avatar for javamann

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.

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Dani AI

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OEM "factory" tools like SoftThinks/PC Angel (as notes) are doing two things at once: they keep a tested reference image of the factory state and they ship a tiny, bootable environment that runs an unattended script to reapply that image. Most consumer tools (Ghost, Acronis, Clonezilla, etc.) separate those pieces: image capture, a rescue/boot environment, and the restore step. You can reproduce the PC Angel experience, but you have to assemble those pieces yourself.

A practical, repeatable workflow:

  1. Prepare a reference PC: remove personal data, uninstall hardware-specific drivers and run Sysprep (Windows) if you plan to deploy to different machines.
  2. Capture the image with your chosen tool (image file on an external USB drive is far easier than dozens of burned CDs).
  3. Build a small bootable rescue ISO (WinPE or Linux) and add an unattended script that runs the restore automatically when the media boots. Example (WinPE + ImageX): 
imagex /capture C: C:\images\factory.wim "Factory Image" /compress fast
wpeinit
imagex /apply X:\factory.wim 1 C:\

This is the same idea behind OEM discs: a bootable environment + an image + an automated apply step.

Two important real-world notes: is right that storing the image on an external HDD is simpler and faster than optical media. is also right to worry about motherboard swaps — a raw image may not boot on different chipsets unless you either Sysprep/generalize before capture or use an imaging product that supports "restore to dissimilar hardware" (driver injection/universal-restore). ’s experience with multi-machine Ghost images shows it can work if you remove chipset/IDE/SATA drivers or prepare the image correctly.

Final tips: test the whole restore on a spare drive or VM before relying on it, keep checksums of your image, keep driver packs and Windows keys handy, and keep at least two copies of your recovery media.

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Member Avatar for HoustonIT

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.

Member Avatar for caperjack

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 ,

Member Avatar for jbennet

nlite?

Member Avatar for caperjack

nlite?

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

Member Avatar for jbennet

no

Member Avatar for caperjack

no

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

Member Avatar for jbennet

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

Member Avatar for caperjack

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

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