One easy way to make a restore disk is to use software like Norton Ghost or Acronis. It’s one time operation that last 10 minutes and you have a copy of your C:\ partition where your operating system is located. It’s a very good option to have after you have a fresh installed Windows with drivers, personal settings and software that you need. To this in Norton Ghost you must boot from the CD or the floppy where you have installed Norton Ghost. You must choose there from the Menu: Local –> Partition –> To Image. You have the option to split the image on multiple CD’s or DVD’s if you plan later to put it on DVD’s or CD’s. You can do this for whatever operating system you have including Linux.

In case that your operating system fails to boot just run Norton Ghost by booting from optical media or floppy and after the program starts you must choose from the Menu: Local –> Partition –> From Image – Restore image. In 10 minutes you have the  fresh system installed with all the previous settings from the past.

If you have Windows XP, 2000, 2003 a good choice will be to use System Restore which is taking snapshots of your windows system and saves them as restore points. These restore points mark configuration places to return to, in the event of a problem of your system which may occur after you install unstable software, and incompatible device drivers. Restore points are created automatically and are restored through the System Restore Wizards which is very simple to use.

With System Restore you can revert to a previous saved state without loosing personal settings and data, Word documents, e-mail messages, and favorites from the Internet explorer. It keeps all the documents which you placed in My Documents, My Pictures.
To use this facility that Windows provide you must have 200 MB of free hard drive space because system uses to store the data taken for the restore points.  If you don’t have this space System Restore it will be deactivated by the system. System Restore creates restore points until the space allocated (200 MB) is filled and after that it will continue to overwrite the oldest entries replacing them with the newest restore points.

Another good choice to restore your system after a problem has occurred is to use the option “Last Known Good Configuration”. This works only if your Windows is booting well in the first stage. To use this you must press F8 at boot time. The screen with Windows options appears and you must select with the arrows this option from the list by pressing ENTER. This is the simplest method to troubleshoot your Windows and it’s solving lots of time and effort.