System Recovery
Ramgopal
9/12/20093 min read
Reviving a windows pc after a virus attack or on upgrading the hard disk has always been a time consuming task, i.e., if you are not depending on any tools. There are two aspects of reviving. First is the operating system and installed software programs like MS Office, Photoshop, Anti-Virus, IDE etc etc. Second is data like email, documents, source code, photos, music, videos, bookmarks, shortcuts etc. Recovering OS and programs is straight forward but time consuming (assuming you have the necessary installation media). Recovering data however is possible only if you have taken backup frequently. While programs and data could be stored on the system partition itself, it would be a good practice to store data on a separate partition. With Windows this isnt obvious because the 'My Documents' folder by default resides on the System partition. Backup data either by manually copying folders & files or using Windows Backup tool or a 3rd party tool like Nero, Seagate DiskWizard, TrueImage etc.
There are several backup/recovery tools that help you backup entire hard disk or specific partitions or folders and files. Windows XP itself has a backup and recovery tool. And then, if you have CD/DVD writer its likely that you got an OEM copy of software (like Nero) which also has backup and recovery features. These tools require that you have a running Windows system before you can restore the files. They are mostly useful for data restoration rather than OS restoration. For the purpose of OS restoration you would need tools like Ghost, TrueImage etc that also have a boot environment. You would then boot from a CD and restore your OS and data. These tools aren't free but for owners of Seagate/Maxtor hard-disks there's a way out. Seagate has a free tool Seagate DiskWizard, which lets you backup and restore both your OS and data, as long as your system has atleast one Seagate/Maxtor hard-disk. This tool is actually a basic version of TrueImage. It allows you to take complete backup of your hard-disk or specific partitions. Incremental backup is not supported in this free version.
I am aware of atleast 3 scenarios with respect to backup and recovery of System Partition.
No System Partition Backup - During recovery OS and software programs need to be installed manually and then data can be restored from backup. Typically, the steps involved would be
Install Windows which usually takes couple of hours
Install Drivers from Motherboard CD for Network/Display etc
Activate your copy of Windows Apply all service packs and security updates after downloading from Microsoft site (depending on how dated your OS version is you may have to apply giga bytes of updates)
Recover data from backup
System Partition Backup using ASR - Backup OS partition using Automated System Recovery (ASR) option of Windows XP Pro. You need to have a floppy on which some key OS files are copied. During recovery, boot from Windows install CD, then for recovery you will need to provide the ASR floppy and then subsequently the system partition backup.
System Partition Backup using 3rd party imaging tool - Once during backup create a bootable recovery disk from the backup tool like Seagate DiskWizard, TrueImage, Ghost etc. Use the recovery disk and boot. Restore the required system backup.
Note:
Take full backup of your system partition whenever you install a new software.
Take frequent backup of your data partition.
Protect your backup from virus attack
By storing the backup files on a partition that has read-only access to your regular log-in user.
For the purpose of backup,
Create a large partition to store the backup files.
Create an admin user who is the owner of the backup partition
Allow read-only permission for all other users of the system
Take backup of the system and data partitions by logging-in as backup user.
Do your regular non-backup related tasks using a different user log-in (can be part of administrators group).
Protecting from virus attacks
Install one or more anti-virus software and keep the virus definitions up-to-date
Install Windows Defender
Run frequent scheduled full-system scans
Perform risky browsing and downloading tasks in a virtual sandboxed environment. This ensures that the viruses if any cannot affect files outside the sandbox. You can install a free tool (for individuals) like Sandboxie for this purpose. After ensuring that the files you downloaded are virus free, you can copy them outside your sandboxed environment.