Products such as Image for Windows/Image for Linux will let you create an image of your disk on CD/DVD/Network Drive. If your drive crashes or just gets really trashed with a virus you can do a "bare metal restore" to a new drive. No reinstallation needed for Windows, Linux, or any of your applications.
<http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/index.htm> The software is not free but it is reasonably priced. Especially when compared to sitting and feeding install disks to a PC and rebooting it many times is the option. I have relegated an old PC to being a file server for our two computers. 500GB, 750GB, and even 1 TeraByte drives are pretty cheap these days. There isn't really a good reason to not have disk images and backups of anything that's worth much of your time. Tim, N9PUZ Toby Burnett wrote: > > I also would be interested as to booting windoze from a memory stick > like a live cd of Linux. > > It takes so long for me to re install everything should I have a system > wide crash. Just to get back back onto win XP pro I have to load XP > home first and then all of XP Pro. With that and all the driver disks > etc and whatever else you loose in the process it can take a good day at > least just to get back to a blank windoze system with everything > working. My Laptop which I just got (Vista) gave the option to make a > recovery disk set (4 DVD's!!!!!) which took the best part of 4 - 5 hours > to create. That's a lot of data even for a memory stick and I dread the > day I have to use them. >