Starting Fresh, Part One

In this Starting Fresh series, I will document how I wiped my hard drive clean and started fresh. In this part, I'll talk about drive imaging. Upcoming posts may include the best applications to install, portable applications, and the like.

Imaging is a very simple concept: take a snapshot of a fully set up computer and use it to easily set up other computers with the same hardware or the same computer in the future. At work this summer, we used Clonezilla to image machines for the workers. Once the image for a specific hardware was created, we simply loaded Clonezilla in a Live CD (the easiest way to run handy Linux-based tools), hit a few buttons, and we had an almost fully set up machine in just a few minutes. The speed was incredible the first time I did it, and I knew I had to try this at home.

Clonezilla is great for corporate use, but I knew my requirements were a little less stringent. Clonezilla is a superset of PartImage, so that's not a bad place to start. Of course, commercial applications such as Norton Ghost exist, but I'm somewhat comfortable with Linux, so I thought I'd save some money.

It took me a short time to figure out how I was going to create the image: at work, we used an SSH server (essentially another computer that hosts files, in this case for Clonezilla to grab and use), but I wanted to go much simpler. At college, I typically only have one machine, this laptop, so I needed a way to store the image locally. While it is possible to use an external hard drive to store the image, I didn't want to finagle with Linux's external drive mounting. After the fact, I've realized this was probably a mistake; it would've been a good, simple solution.

In any case, I also wanted to make at least two partitions on my laptop drive, to keep my data separate from Windows and my applications. Partitions are a nice way to divide one physical hard drive into several virtual hard drives that Windows sees as different devices.

The two main advantages to multiple partitons are adding a simple layer of protection from dumb viruses, and having a little less backing up to do when I want to wipe Windows again. One downside to this is having to resize partitions when you realize you need more space on the application drive.

In this case, a data partition is a good enough place for PartImage to save your main Windows image to. I used SystemRescueCd to run PartImage, which was dead simple. I followed a few of the good guides on the internet, notably this guide for Ubuntu (no difference), which handily showed how to mount my data partition and show PartImage where it was.

After imaging the partition, I booted into Windows, played around for a day or so, and then used PartImage again to wipe back to my saved image. It worked like a charm, and I had my known-working install back. I will continue to perfect my Windows install, and make periodic images. Then, when the inevitable Windows slowdown occurs, I simply wipe back to a good one, and have a fresh, fast, stable OS again.

PartImage does not take the place of backups- I do not reccommend you create images that include your data, because they'd be huge. However, combining proper data backups with Windows backups is great, and anyone can do it with a little guidance.

I will write about why I wiped my hard drive and what applications I installed on my image later.