Newbie needs help with C: drive backup.

Sorry If I duplicate any previous posts...I am not very technical so I may not understand some of the other posts. I have added an external drive to backup my entire C: drive. The software included does not capture a true copy of my C: drive. The external drive menu lists partition numbers and I have no idea what exists in this partitions, I would like to find a software that shows a menu exactly like my C: drive menu. Like most everyone these days money is hard to come by. Appreciate any help.

 

When you say "copy" of your c: drive, do you mean exact image of everything on it or simply a copy of some files on it?

 

Sorry... I mean an exact image of my C: drive (I also have a D: drive which appears to be some kind of backup). I would like to see no difference between looking at the C: drive menu or the external drive menu. The program I have is called "Macrium". My goal is twofold, 1) If I mess up a program or file I would be able to go to my external drive backup and move the file or program back to my C: drive. 2) If my system crashes or gets lost I would be able to move everything from my external drive to my C: drive, recovering my system.
I am running Vista Home premium on a Emachine with 894meg of ram available a AMD 64 processor 3800+ and 784 GB available space on my hard drive.
Appreciate your efforts to help me.

 

It seems like you have a leaning curve. The Macrium Reflect program that you have WILL build an exact image of your c: drive, but you'll need a program called Roborestore and a BARTPE type bootable CD to restore your image to a clean formatted drive.

You could use DriveImage XML to build an image of your c: drive and use the same utility in a browser like fashion to identify files to extract and restore from the image. Free by the way.

You could use Acronis TrueImage to do the same kind of thing AND it will build a bootable CD for you in case you want to reinstall your c: drive from the image created.

The d: partition on your machine is most likely a recovery partition created by the manufacturer of your machine to restore it to original condition as you bought it from the store. If you use the recovery to rebuild your machine all of your data on the c: drive will be overwritten.

 

Not so. The Macrium Reflect program includes a feature to build a bootable rescue CD, which you then use to restore an image to an unbootable computer.

 

Macrium Reflect will do what you want except you cannot restore installed programs. You can restore selected files or the entire partition, but not anything in between. Restoring a partition will overwrite everything, so you do also need to have separate backup copies of any personal files that postdate the backup.

 

Correct. My mistake, you can build a restore CD from Macrium.

 

Thank you everyone, Being a nontechie I am not sure I understand all your info. I will download Acronis TrueImage, do a backup with it Sunday nite, and try to figure out what I have. Again, thank you all.

 

If you already have Macrium Reflect you will not gain anything from getting Acronis as they do exactly the same job in the same way. If you can explain your problem with Macrium I'm sure we can help you.

What these programs do is ask you to choose which drives or partitions you wish to back up, and to choose where you want the backup stored. The backup cannot be stored on any of the partitions you are backing up, so you must use a different drive, in your case your external.

You also have to create from the menu a rescue CD, and when you want to restore an image you have to boot the computer from the CD. You can then select the backup you wish to restore, and the drive or partition you want to restore it to.

Try it.

 

Hi again...I talked to Macrium Reflect support, they told me they do not support Vista. I may just have to take this whole mess to BestBuy and tell them to make it do what I'm looking for. Thank all of you again.

 

That simply isn't so. Here is the publishers website.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

 

Sorry ...got it confused with a call to Symtec. But finding DriveImag XML easier to use and understand. Will now find Bartpe Vista instructions. Thank you all for your help.