Restoring an XP HDD image on a pc running 98/2000?

I'm expecting a new lappy shortly, and it doesn't come with recovery cds. Whilst there will hopefully be some on-board way of creating recovery media, I'm trying to think of a contingency plan.

The best I can come up with is to use Acronis True Image to create an image of the XP drive. Then, if the Acronis bootable option fails-it did the last time I tried it- I thought I could simply install my copy of win 2000, install Acronis, and then recover the XP image in the normal way- using the image saved on the external HDD. Theoretically, I can't see any problems with this.

Practically, will it work?

 

It wont work, different hardware profiles.

 

I would just be using the 2000 install as a piggy back. I'm not talking about transferring an Xp image from one machine to another- that would cause a differenc ein HW profiles- I'm talking about creating an XP image of machine X, then, IF the ATI bootable option fails, installing win 2000 on machine X and using it as a piggyback to recover the XP image that was created of machine x in it's original state! Everything's taking place on the one machine- hardware profile would remain constant.

Is that still gonna be an issue?

 

What about creating just a bootable USB key that you can use for doing that? I've created one I use for Ghost so I can always recover a ghost image to my Hard Drive.

 

i'm not sure about win2000 and acronis but i agree with arla, recovering using a ghost image is a lot easier and more likely to work in my opinion

 

LOL, it would be a lot easier, granted, but I don't have Ghost- assuming you mean the Norton software?

 

Yes, do mean the Norton software, as a side note, if you are in the US you can normally pickup Ghost very cheap, might be worth looking into, I'm just not sure about Acronis, seem to be a number of really scathing reviews out there (backups that are just worthless) as opposed to Ghost which, while it has a number of bad reviews, it's normally "can't get the **** software to work (do anything)" which in my book is better than thinking it's working and finding out the backups are worthless, but to each his own.

 

For me, a big USB external drive + Linux boot disk/liveCD + dd = disk image.