This tutorial isn’t going to be as in depth as my previous ones.  The problem is this procedure can vary greatly from computer to computer.  It also requires a basic knowledge of how a bootdisk works and the use of some DOS commands.

As the IT department for the most of my family, I’m always looking for ways to minimize the amount of time I need to spend fixing whatever might be wrong with a cousins, aunt or uncle’s, or even parents machine.

One of the quickest ways to break your home computer is to install every piece useless software from every website you can find.  Most of which is probably loaded with spyware and viruses that are usually impossible to get rid of.  If my family gets something nasty on their system my opinion is usually to whipe the computer and start over.

Reinstalling everything on the computer and getting exactly the way it was before can be a tedious and time consuming experiance.  My current solution doesn’t exactly run much quicker, but it certainly automates the process a bit taking out some of the monotony.  It’s a little something I’ve dubbed “The Ghostbuster”.

The Ghostbuster isn’t entirely clever, but a very useful part of my toolkit.  It’s basically a bootable usb hard disk that has a copy of Norton Ghost installed.  The idea is I can plug this drive into any computer capable of booting from a USB device.  Then, by going directly to Ghost I can either create a perfect backup of a machine or restore it back to it’s original state.

Things you’ll need to make one of your own:
USB Hard disk
a DOS Boot disk
with some basic commands loaded (FDISK, FORMAT, and SYS. EDIT would make things go faster)
Copy of Norton Ghost that runs from DOS (specifically 2003)

For the hard disk I’m using 250GB Western Digital passport drive.  Its available on Amazon.com.  I also found it at my local Walmart for $80. I chose it for its storage and portability.  I’m also going to assume, that whatever drive you buy is already FAT32 formatted.  The drive I’m using is and so is almost any USB drive you’ll purchase.

The best place to get a boot disk if you don’t have one is Bootdisk.com.  They have oodles of them.  Something for just about everything.  I’m using an old windows 95 CD for this.

First you’ll need to get into your system BIOS and set the USB device to be the first in the boot-up sequence.  How to do this is going to vary from machine to machine.  To get to your BIOS screen you’ll most likely have to press one of the function keys or the Delete key immediately after you turn on your computer.  You machine will probably have something along the lines “F# Setup” in one of the corners of your screen.  If it says “F2 Setup” then you press the F2 key to get into the BIOS.  If it says “F10 Setup” then you press F10 to get into the BIOS, etc…

You’ll know you’re in when you see some kind of blue screen with lots of white text.  That what your average BIOS screen looks like.  Usually there are keyboard commands listed along the bottom of the screen.

Flip around your BIOS menus until you find the “Boot Order”.  Using the on screen instructions move USB to the top of your boot order.  Apparently the system won’t allow FDISK to make this drive an “active” partition unless its first in the boot order.  This will be essential.

Next put in the boot disk you have, and power on the PC with the USB drive connected to your machine.  Let it boot up completely until you get you A:\> prompt.  If you are using a Windows 95 CD like I am, you’ll have to select for it to boot to a prompt as apposed to a Windows setup.

At the prompt (A:\>) type FDISK and press enter.

The first thing that should come up is a screen telling you that drive more than 512MB are detected and you should enable large disk support.  Press Y for yes and enter.

Your computer has a disk larger than 512 MB.  This version of Windows
includes improved support for large disks, resulting in more efficient
use of disk space on large drives, and allowing disks over 2 GB to be
formatted as a single drive.

IMPORTANT:  If you enable large disk support and create any new drives on this

disk, you will not be able to access the new drive(s) using other operating

systems, inlcuding some versions of Windows 95 and Windows NT, as well as

earlier versions of Windows and MS-DOS.  In addition, disk utilites that

were not designed explicitly for the FAT32 file system will not be able

to work with this disk.  If you need to access this disk with other operating

systems or older disk utilities, do not enable large drive support.

Do you wish to enable large disk support (Y/N)...........? [N]

On the menu that follows, press option 2.

Microsoft Windows 95

Fixed Disk Setup Program

(C)Copyright Microsoft Corp.  1983 - 1995

FDISK Options

Current Fixed Disk Drive: 1

Choose one of the following:

1.  Create DOS Partition or Logical DOS Drive

2. Set active partition

3. Delete partition or logical DOS Drive

4. Display partition information

5. Change current fixed disk drive

Enter choice: [1]

Press Esc to exit FDISK

You’ll get a table with a few lines of text.  You’ll see at least one marked with an “A” under the “Status” column.  Probably the first line and it is most likely your main hard disk.  The last line is most likely your USB drive.  Press the number corresponding with the correct partition.  An “A” should appear under the “Status” column.  Press Esc to return to the menu and again to leave FDISK.  Agree to saving any changes that are made.

Set Active Partition

Current fixed disk drive: 1

Partition  Status   Type     Volume Lable  Mbytes   System    Usage

    1         A    Non-DOS                  8012                74%

    2              EXT DOS                  2769                26%

The only startable partition on Drive 1 is already set active.

Press Esc to continue

Reboot the computer and let it boot to the bootdisk again.  When you return to your prompt, type

dir c:

and it should show whatever is on the USB drive.  Hope its nothing important as we are about to format the drive.

Next type

format /s c:

All data on the drive will be erased, and the basic DOS system files will be loaded.

The process may take a while, especially with a larger drive.  Took over an hour with my drive.  Be patient.  As long as the drive light is blinking, it’s still working.
When it’s finished and you’ve returned to a prompt, type

fdisk /mbr

Reboot.  If all has gone according to plan, then you have booted to a DOS prompt again, but this time from the USB drive.  Can’t do much else with it at this point.  It’s essentially a blank disk aside from the boot files.  Shut down your computer and remove both your boot floppy or CD, and the USB drive.  Power up your computer normally.

Once your computer is completely up, plug in your USB drive.  Copy the files from your copy of Norton Ghost over to the USB drive.

Create a text file on the USB drive and name it “CONFIG.SYS”  The contents of the file should be as follows:

device=himem.sys /testmem:off
DOS=HIGH,UMB
fileshigh=60
buffers=30
lastdrivehigh=z

Create another text file on the USB drive and name it “AUTOEXEC.BAT”.  Contents of the file should be as follows:

@echo off
path=c:\;
ghost

When powering up a computer with the USB drive plugged in, this list of commands will execute, the first two really just for aesthetics, the final one launches Norton Ghost.

That should be it.  Next time you plug in that USB drive and boot the computer, it should boot from the USB drive and immediately launch Norton Ghost.  If it doesn’t, drop me a comment and we’ll see where you went wrong.  I’ll also let you know this isn’t the speediest device.  When backing up an image it takes this drive as long as five hours.  Maybe an hour less to restore.  That was an 80GB drive.  The reason its so slow is that the BIOS is emulating a standard hard disk connection over USB version 1.  Hopefully in the future they’ll move it to USB version 2 and we’ll see an improvement with faster motherboards.  Though even at the slower speeds, it would save you from the weekend long process of restoring your family members computer.  Restoring to factory settings, patching the OS, updating the virus scanner, installing all the games and applications they’ve bought, can be done by restoring from a previous imaging, and letting it run unattended.

Directions for this tutorial have been based on the one provided by Aaltonen.us