From the Desk of Paul Elvidge

Making a backup of you entire windows partition is a great recovery tool - if ever needed!!

I have used PartImage from a number of different rescue disks (I think I may already have an article on this).  However I struggled with my ntfs disk lately using a USB boot linux distribution.  Here's how I did it.

Create a bootable USB stick using linux.......

1). Download the distribution of linux you wish to use, I used "SystemrescueCD...." as this comes with partimage installed.

2) Download "Universal USB Installer..." utility and run this utility which will help you choose the USB disk and the downloaded linux file to install.

Now boot your computer from the USB disk - most modern PCs & Laptops - you may need to press 'Esc' or F1 or some other key as your computer boots to select the boot menu.

1). You can enter either the command line or GUI version of linux.

2). Create a directory called d;      mkdir /d

3). Mount the place you want to backup to (for me it was my windows d-drive which was on sda5)       ntfs-3g /dev/sda5 /d

4) Run; partimage  and select the partition you wish to backup followed by the path of your backup files & name eg;    /d/Win7_backup_file

I have not gone into detail of partimage as that is done many times on the web, but harder to find ntfs mounting with read/write capability.