CF-18D reinstalling windows

Hello guys this is my first post. We purchased 5 Cf-18s and they are working like a charm, I wanted to throw this out in advance in case something was to happen. They are off lease units and did not come with a windows cd. Can I back up the entire drive onto a USB flash drive and if something happened is there a way to reload from the flash? The flash is a 32gig so the room is fine.

 

I'd suggest using a tool like Norton Ghost to make an image of the entire partition. If you don't currently have Ghost, the system rescue CD ( http://www.sysresccd.org) is a bootable linux CD that contains a bunch of tools including Partimage, which will backup/restore your partition

nine

 

Ok if the image of the entire drive is created do I just add to the flash drive? and then will that allow windows to read and boot from USB without a OS?

 

Or better yet would this work, we have several external HDD caes with older drives, can we just pull a HD from one of the good CF-18s and completely copy the drive to a desktop then replace the HD with the formatted one and the just copy all files to it and reinstall into CF-18? Would that basiclly make the laptop boot? Please forgive me if I am asking to many questions, just trying to be prepared.

 

There's a good writeup on lifehacker of the process
http://lifehacker.com/software/geek...rd-drive-with-the-system-rescue-cd-292972.php

That process has you create a backup image in a second partition on the local drive. My preference is to create the backup image on an external USB drive (either flash or HDD), as it makes it easier to move the image from system to system.

To do this, skip step 4 in the writeup, and instead connect the external disk.

In step 5, you will need to determine the partition name for the external drive. At the command prompt, type fdisk -l (thats a lower case L). The output will list all partitions on each drive. The external disk will be the one that is _not_ /dev/sda1 (or /dev/sda*, /dev/sda is the first internal disk). Use this partition in the ntfs-3g mount command in place of /dev/hda2 shown in the writeup.

From there on, follow the instructions as written. To restore, the process is essentially the same, except you select "restore" on the partimage main screen

nine

 

Fire.ems,
Whatever you do, have a way to reload other than by hand, it sucks. Other than that they are great little machines.
CAP

 

Thanks for all your help, lets hope none crash but if they do then I will just image one of the others.