Create Recovery Disk

After a year or more of working with your operating system, your computer is full installed with applications and programs, with precious personal data, lots of documents which are important for you and you need them from time to time. But surprise, next morning you open your computer and it doesn’t start. You see a big and fat error which it’s saying that your computer is failing to boot, your operating system is not capable to boot.

Usually, when you buy a new computer you will get some sort of restore/recovery disc accompanied by instructions and procedures. This is used to restore your operating system and software back to factory condition so your PC will run as it did when you bought it. This is usually done by saving an image of the partition where the OS & installed programs are located to another partition in an image.
The image is saved to a single file or split into a spanned set of files if it’s total size exceeds FAT32′s 4GB file size limitation depending upon file system used.

A second solution which is very good consists in a manually backup of your entire C:\ partition. After you have installed all the programs that you need in your work you can simply create an image of your operating system partition by booting from your floppy/CD/DVD drive. You can use Symantec Norton Ghost  which a great tool to recover your initial file system. You can create a boot floppy disk with the utility provided by this program. It’s very easy and an energy-time saving procedure. Or you can also create a recovery boot CD. You find all the necessary instructions detailed in the help of Norton Ghost program.

It can be used on just about any computer including those that are custom built or running Linux. The two main methods of doing this is by either storing the image on the hard disk or on a recordable disc. The advantage of storing the image to hard disk is faster speed and the flexibility of overwriting images. Very useful if you make frequent changes to your images. Ghost has the option of burning images directly to CD or DVD. The downside is that it requires the user to use the bootable floppy along with those discs.

You can also use other software for cloning your partition like: Acronis, Clonezilla, DriveImage and so on.