time saving restore for Windows

[Guest Will]

A useful time saving restore method for anyone's Windows.

 

May have been on the 13th that I did an Ntbackup of Mce2005 OS on C: drive,

all folders & system state then copied the 9 GB Backup.bkf to external disk

where music pictures etc. are also kept;

see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308422

 

After messing up attempt to remove rootkit which left OS dead, on 16th I

restored Mce2004 from the D: Hp_Recovery partition which put PC into 2003

purchase date condition, and did minimal Microsoft updates to and including

SP2. Then gave external Usb Disk Backup.bkf to the restore side of Ntbackup

with replace settings for every object in 9 GB saying to myself, there is no

way this can work ( writing on top of the OS doing restore?! - it must do

renames & deletes on initial strartup ) but it completed in ~ 35 minutes.

This saved ~ 4 hours of uninstalls, reinstalls etc. the major part of which

is upgrade to Mce2005 from DVD that HP provided and which I must activate by

telephone, the activation code having grown to 56 digits.