Questions about doing a clone of the hard drive

I have a windows vista home HP laptop and my laptop's volume stopped working. I was doing a sytem restore to fix it and it was working fine. After some other installation, when I did a system restore to the working state, it is not working anymore. I called HP's customer service and they suggested system recovery and I want to do a back up of my hard drive. I have some program which I have subscribed to and the settings & don't want to lose that when I go back to the factory settings. I read the forums and found out about driveimagexml. Should I use that or Windows Vista's complete back up of the computer? If I do either one of these, will I be able to get all my programs back or just the operating system?
I am a newbie and need help!
Thanks
Vidyaram

 

Acronis True Image is a good program. It makes an image of your system so you can go back to exactly what you have right now.

 

I have never used DriveImage or Vista's built in Backup. But I do know that to actually restore using Vista you need to have business or ultimate edition.

I use Acronis True Image and I have never had an issue. I have restored back to the image I made of a clean install numerous times. I love ATI.

 

Thanks for your responses.If you have a good set up to backup, I understand this will work. Right now, my audio driver is messed up and I want to do a factory install to clear that and then I want all the other programs in my program files and C: to be cloned to my hard drive. Is that possible? I'll try using the trial version of Acronis true image to begin with!
Thanks in advance
Vidya

 

No! This is not possible. After you restore to a "factory install", you're ONLY option for getting programs and settings back is to reinstall the programs. No imaging software is going to be able to do whjat you want. They would only be able to overwrite the "factory install" with the old image state with the audio driver issue and all.

Gary

 

I would suggest you to reinstall the audio driver instead of doing a factory restore.

 

I reinstalled the old driver but it is not working!
I see that in true image you have the option to back up the computer but not the system driver or state of the computer. I just want to verify that after my factory reinstall, I can just restore the c drive with the programs.
Thanks
Vidya

 

As Gary said, factory restore doesn't bring back your current programs. You should reinstall them manually. If you backup your current system, then again you will have the same audio problem.

Try this: Uinstall (delete the driver option -checked) the audio device from the device manager, then restart your system, and reinstall the audio driver.

 

Another vote for Acronis True Image. Excellent program.

 

If you restore the C drive you will be right back where you are right now. Restoring an image of a drive wipes out EVERYTHING and puts the contents of the image back on the drive.

Gary

 

Backups: Paragon Drive Backup Personal / NovaBackup Pro

Imaging/Cloning: HD Clone is a good FREE alternative to the more popular commercial programs

 

There is one possibility the OP might explore for doing what s/he wants to do, but it's a bit clunky and no guarantees that it'll work flawlessly (or at all, I don't give guarantees ).

Basically, the first step would be to clone the existing hdd onto an external drive, using something like Acronis True Image (very easy to use). The next step would be to do the factory reinstallation of the OS, drivers and necessary utilities only.

The final step would be to try and use one of the transfer apps available that, or so they claim, will transfer files and settings, including application programs, from an old computer to a new computer so that they can be used without having to reinstall everything (at least that's what the app developers claim, how well it works I don't know since I've never used them). The two apps that come to mind are:

• PCMover from Avanquest, and
• Transfer Your PC from Nova Development.

Now, the fly in the ointment, as I'm sure many will quickly see, is that those apps are designed with the idea that you'd have two computers, and be moving data/apps/etc from one computer to another; they do not really seem to address the issue of moving data/apps/etc from one drive on a computer to another drive that's attached to the same computer. Since, as I said, I've never used these apps, I don't know if what I'm speculating on is possible; however, necessity is the mother of invention, and it may be worth the OP's time to check into whether or not such a same-computer transfer can be done with these apps.

As an alternative, one might try attaching the external drive onto which the original installation had been cloned to a second computer, and then see if one could then "transfer" the apps & etc from the external drive on computer No. 2 back over to the fresh factory install on the hdd in computer No. 1.

 

I tried deleting it from the driver manager and then resinstalling it with no luck.
Funny you should suggest this idea, I cloned the image to an external drive and then did a factory restoration and copied the drivers using a driver back up software driver genius pro to my external drive. But when I try to restore it, it says that with the trial version, I can only restore video drivers. I don't know if it showed any message like that while I backed it up. I don't want to pay if I already don't have all the drivers downloaded. I can't think about redoing the same steps again
Rajesh, when I look at the driver files for me realtek audio, they are the same as available from HP's website. In the device manager, it says that the device is working properly, but when I click on the test button to play test sound, it gives a message unable to play test sound. I wonder if the problem is something else other than the driver file. But when I go to the factory settings, the sound works in the laptop!

Thanks
Vidya

 

Did you contact HP? I think that restoring to the factory state is the only option at this point. It seems that your audio card is not working.

 

I did contact HP. They are of absolutely no help!
Thanks
Vidya