In the many Years that I have been doing computing and the amount of times I have lost various data through rebuilding or just a dodgy hard-drive – I have come to set out a way to make sure that rebuilding a system means no lost data.
Partitioning the Hard-drive
Most system’s come with One HD Fitted and partitioned as one Big drive (C: In windows) – this is great as you can get the most out of your drive but if you rebuild windows – you loose the lot. What is best to do here is either re-partition the drive (example: Partition magic) or fit another drive. What can be done now is all the games you install – you shove them on the D Drive in this example. If you patch up the games and use a NO-CD Crack in this instance, then even if you re-install the OS, the games can still be played. I need to add that not all games work this way such as BF:2, LOTR, C&C3 etc – in this instance you would have to reinstall them again.
Moving Your “Documents”
By Default – your “My Documents” folder lives in the C: Drive but if you filled this up – you would have to copy it off before re-building. You can right click and select a different Area – this been somewhere on the D: Drive. If you have a lot of stuff of course, Writing to DVD to make 100% is the best option.
Ghosting a perfect Setup
Norton Ghost (bootable from CD) is a perfect cloning tool for your OS – what you basically do is built a machine with say Windows, do all the updates and install the base applications you might feel you need, not too many though at this point, so WinRAR, Office and so forth. Now if you make an image and you can make it fit 4.7Gigs – then you can rebuild your machine in a lot less time then starting from Scratch.
