After purchasing a 500GB external HDD recently, I have just created a
full image of my Win XP laptop's 40GB C drive (the only partition it
has). Since the internal HDD is NTFS and the external one is FAT32 I
wonder if I am actually as safe as I had believed to be.

Concretely, I wish to know:

1) In case of system crash can I simply copy the entire image back to
my laptop's internal HDD to re-create the system state at the time of
backup?

2) Will the fact that the storage media have different formats affect
data integrity in any way?

3) Which conversion steps - if any - are necessary to achieve a full
system recovery after copying the image back onto the laptop from the
external drive?


Thanks in advance for your help!

Cheers -

Pat


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pat_mc

"pat_mc" <p_surname@hotmail.com> wrote in message
newsat_mc.35nudk@no-mx.tabletquestions.com...
How did you create your image? With an imaging program? If
so then the image retains the original file system attributes,
regardless of the file system of the medium where you store it.

"pat_mc" <p_surname@hotmail.com> wrote in message
newsat_mc.35nudk@no-mx.tabletquestions.com...
If you created an image of your HD onto the external drive...
it's an actual sector by sector copy...so the image itself is not on a fat32
partition.

Pegasus \(MVP\);932389 Wrote:
Thanks, Pegasus. This I did not know. And yes, indeed, I created the
mirror with the freeware imaging tool 'DriveImageXML'
(http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm) which seems to make a
sector-by-sector copy. So I gather I should be OK as for this full
drive image.

I did, however, also copy all of my wife's HDD from her broken Windows
XP laptop using a 'Knoppix Linux ' (http://www.knopper.net/)bootable
from CD. Those files I only copied using the Linux command 'Copy to' on
all folders in the main partition.
Am I then right in assuming that these direct file copies are not
re-transferable as easily? If there are challenges, what will they be?

Thanks again -

Pat


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pat_mc

On Mar 2, 2:36*pm, pat_mc <p_surn...@hotmail.com> wrote:
You must now that Microsoft has "lamed" the Fat32 partition format in
XP. You can not store any files greater than 4GB nor can you re-do the
Fat32 partitions directly with XP (limit: 32GB)

The short answer is yes.

A disk image is just a string of 1's and 0's that represent the original
disk. When restored, they bring back all attributes of the image, including
the format. In fact, if the image contained multiple partitions, restoring
the image would bring all of them back. (This is not your case, since you
have only one partition on the internal hard drive, but its is a more
extreme example to illustrate the principle.)

The only limitation of FAT32 with respect to images is that no single file
on FAT32 can be larger than 4 Gig. If the image is larger than that, it
must be broken into two or more files. Most imaging software is smart
enough to do this automatically (e.g., GHOST, TrueImage).

One thing to note, a disk image is slightly different than a partition
image, even if there is only one partition on the disk. A disk image will
contain the master boot record and thus can be restore to either the
original hard drive or a replacement (blank, raw) hard drive. A partition
image usually needs to be restored to the same hard drive. If a partition
image resorted to a new (blank, raw) hard drive, the system may not boot.
To fix that use either FDISK /MBR or use the XP recovery console's command
FIXMBR. I have heard that TrueImage version 9 or 10 will also handle the
boot record during a restore.

"pat_mc" <p_surname@hotmail.com> wrote in message
newsat_mc.35nudk@no-mx.tabletquestions.com...

smlunatick wrote:
But the 4 GB limitation for files in FAT32 has nothing to do with the
operating system, it's just a function of FAT32.

The (likely) bigger potential problem is that 32 GB limit, but that can be
avoided with third party utilties, if needbe.

The 4GB file limitation is not "laming" in XP. It is inherent in FAT32 and
has always been true.

"smlunatick" <yveslec@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:0d22c06b-b63d-469d-83fc-9acc91970f59@c33g2000hsd.googlegroups.com...
On Mar 2, 2:36 pm, pat_mc <p_surn...@hotmail.com> wrote:
You must now that Microsoft has "lamed" the Fat32 partition format in
XP. You can not store any files greater than 4GB nor can you re-do the
Fat32 partitions directly with XP (limit: 32GB)

smlunatick;932447 Wrote:

smlunatick -

Thanks for pointing out the limitations to FAT32 introduced by
Microsoft under XP.

The data I copied directly from NTFS to FAT32 is about 20GB - so the
32GB limit will not be a problem. As I mentioned, I copied those data
under Linux, so I am not aware of any problems with files larger than
4GB. In fact, I believe there were no files of that size involved
anyway.

My concern is to find out whether there will be any problems when I
copy these data back from FAT32 to NTFS after re-installing XP.

Thanks again.

Pat


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pat_mc