Again Drive Image: Booting

[Flying_DutchMan]

I've got a question about drive image.. namely I have an image file of a clean install of win2k + office and stuff on a seperate partition (F. My computer runs on C:. Now my C: partition is full of commercials, buggy programs, suffers from a trashy register etc. so I want to format C.

However, I can't figure out how to get the image file on my F: partition back on the C: partition without an OS. And since I can't ask help on internet or wherever after I formatted C: I'd like to do it right the first time..

I know it's not too hard since I've seen someone do it before, he just made a bootfloppy, formatted C: and entered some command lines et voila. Tho since I'm 1. a complete image noob and 2. quite a big non-OS pc handle noob I wouldn't know how he did it. Anyone?

[Harold7]

If you can, try booting from the Drive Image CD and you should be able to do a Restore to copy the image file from F:\ back to C:\ that way.

Or you can boot with a floppy and then navigate to whatever drive letter is your CD and then use these commands:

Y (your drive letter):\CD\English\Execute (enter)

Y:\English\Execute\PQDI (enter)

and Drive Image should then load from the CD into DOS so you can run a Restore.

Note: I haven't used this method in quite a while so it may be Y:\English\Execute (enter) and then Y:\ PQDI (enter)

Just boot from a floppy, navigate to the CD drive letter and then do a DIR and if you can see the contents of the Drive Image CD those commands should work for you.

[Flying_DutchMan]

That's one part of the problem. I got win2k, office and the drive image stuff thru my dads company. So I don't have any CD's. With that I always have huge difficulties trying to get my cd players online without OS's.. So I really have to do it all with floppies to boot the stuff and then get Drive Image to put the stuff back on C: somehow..

[Harold7]

Maybe your best option would be to buy (I know that's an evil concept to some) the retail version of Drive Image 2002 and that way you won't have the problem anymore... a good investment under any circumstance.

[Flying_DutchMan]

Lol, true. Then again I got 25 euro's left for the next 2 weeks (damn university parties.. I even had to cancel my weekly pizza's ) and I don't want to pluck it illegally from the uni-network. I have no problems doing that with sucky winprograms but not with programs like this. I'll do that if nobody has an answer for this problem tho, but if anyone knows how to do it without cd I'd really appreciate it.

[Flying_DutchMan]

**** UPDATE ****

Sooo.. now I finally managed to boot Image Explorer without an operating system I got another problem. I can't acces my partition! How to acces them?? Can you do it with a win boot disk?

[nukes]

What sort of partition? If its NTFS you can't do it from DOS unless you use something from ntfs.com
Possibly the windows recovery console could help, but I don't know how well that works running programs.

[Flying_DutchMan]

Woop, I did it. It turned out that the rescue disks maker didn't copy all the necessary files to the floppies, so I dl'ed the files from www.kinnetic.com After that it's just a matter of getting your mouse to work, format c: and start ImageExplorer. Quite a relieve after some IT'ers told you it's impossible.. saved me alot of effort at least