Creating backup image from your Microsoft Windows partition

Last updated $Date: 2008-09-06 05:57:01 $

Martti Kuparinen <martti.kuparinen@iki.fi>

http://www.iki.fi/kuparine/comp/windows/backup.html

Abstract

This article describes how I created a backup image of my Microsoft Windows partition on my laptop after installing Microsoft Windows. With this method reinstalling Microsoft Windows is a simple and fast task.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Installing Microsoft Windows
3. Preparing for backup
4. Taking a backup
5. Restoring from a backup
6. Useful links

1. Introduction

We all know that one needs to reinstall Microsoft Windows from time to time, there are too many reasons to list here why a clean reinstallation is the best and maybe the only cure to your PC. And we all know that installing Microsoft Windows, the missing device drivers, all the updates and your other applications takes a long time, typically several hours.

I decided to tackle this problem by taking a snapshot of the whole Microsoft Windows partition right after clean installation on my USB disk. In order to follow this document you need to have:

This document was tested with Microsoft Windows Vista but it should work with other Microsoft Windows versions as well.

2. Installing Microsoft Windows

We need to perform a clean installation once. This will take several hours to complete so be prepared. First we install Microsoft Windows, next we install all the updates and all the missing device drivers. Finally we install other applications needed on this PC. Remember security while doing the initial installation, this must be done in a safe network behind a firewall or at least some NAT box. There's no point of installing Windows XP without SP2 while directly connected to a xDSL line and then later discover your PC is full of malware.

Things I usually install on every Microsoft Windows PC I use:

Once everything is ready, run Disk Cleanup (Start > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup > Files from all users on this computer), select everything from the Disk Cleanup tab and ask all system restore points to be removed (More Options > System Restore and Shadow Copies > Cleanup).

Next run CCleaner to remove some remaining garbage. Let it also find and fix all registry problems. Next run Auslogics Registry Defrag and finally Auslogics Disk Defrag. Now everything should be ready for the backup.

3. Preparing for backup

Before taking the actual backup we boot the PC with a Linux Live CD (or we could of course use the already-installed Linux on the same PC). The main thing is that we can NOT run Microsoft Windows while taking the backup. The backup disk is not used yet so there's no need to plug it in yet.

Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal if you are using Ubuntu) and follow the next steps to first erase some files not needed on the backup image. Next we fill the unused disk space on your Microsoft Windows partition with zeros to make the compressed backup image as small as possible. Text shown in bold are commands which should be executed on the terminal. 

# Check the partition table
sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1        4864    39070048+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2            4865        6080     9767520   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            6081        6202      979965   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4            6203       19457   106470787+  83  Linux

# Set WIN to match your Microsoft Windows partition and then mount it
export WIN="/dev/sda1"
export MNT="/tmp/windows"

# Mount the Microsoft Windows partition
mkdir -p ${MNT}
sudo mount -t ntfs-3g ${WIN} ${MNT}

# Check the disk usage
df -h ${MNT}
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1              38G   13G   25G  34% /tmp/windows

# Remove files not wanted on the backup image
cd ${MNT}
sudo rm -rf \
  hiberfil.sys \
  pagefile.sys \
  Users/*/AppData/Local/Temp/* \
  Windows/Temp/* \
  Windows/SoftwareDistribution/Download/*

# Zero all unused disk space
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=REMOVE bs=32k
sudo rm -f REMOVE

# All done
cd
sudo umount ${MNT}

4. Taking a backup

In order to take a backup of the Microsoft Windows partition, we boot to Linux (we either use Linux already installed on the same PC or a Live CD). Next we need to connect the backup disk and then we simply copy everything from the Microsoft Windows partition, compress it on-the-fly and store the compressed image on the backup disk. 

# Where to store the backup image?
df | grep /media
/dev/sdb1             230G  163G   55G  75% /media/backup

# Set DST to your backup disk (this could also be NFS-mounted)
export DST="/media/backup"

# Take a backup and compress it
sudo dd if=${WIN} | bzip2 -9 -c > ${DST}/windows.bz2
ls -lh ${DST}/windows.bz2

Next we save the current partition table information so it's possible to re-create the Microsoft Windows partition with right size.

sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda > windows.txt echo >> windows.txt sudo cfdisk -Ps /dev/sda >> windows.txt echo >> windows.txt sudo cfdisk -Pt /dev/sda >> windows.txt

5. Restoring from a backup

Restoring Microsoft Windows from the backup image simple, we boot to Linux (again we either use Linux already installed on the same PC or a Live CD), connect the backup disk, decompress the backup image on-the-fly and copy everything to the Microsoft Windows partition. 

# Set WIN (see chapter 3) and DST (see chapter 4)
bzcat ${DST}/windows.bz2 | sudo dd of=${WIN}

The previous assumes we are restoring Microsoft Windows on a partition which is exactly the same size as the original partition. If there's need to have different size for the new partition, we might try this:

6. Useful links