[How-to] Make a full backup of your VAIO Z

[pyr0]

I wrote up this short guide since there are so many people out here trying to image/clone/recover their Z’s RAIDed SSDs and fail because most drive imaging software and boot disks do not support or correctly recognize the RAID array used in the newer Z’s. Standard linux tools like dd work for sector-by-sector clone but not every user here is familiar with linux and this method is not very efficient. With this method you are able to fully backup your entire system with ease, making regular backups more comfortable.

What does that method do?
With this, you are able to make an image (complete backup) of all your data, partitions and boot records of your computer to an external USB drive. With that, you can revert back to your backed up system in minutes. After you restored your system back, you can just boot up again into your clean system. Reactivation of Windows, Office or stuff is not needed since you cloned your system to an image file and back. It is also possible to clone your device to another similar one. Especially when you need to send your laptop for repair, it is useful to backup your machine, wipe the drive due to privacy and security reasons and revert back on the repaired machine in order to have everything as it was before the repair again.

DISCLAIMER:
I do not provide any link of software mentioned in this post – google for it yourself. Use the software mentioned only when you have legal right to do so – you need a valid license for the contained software. Not having a license and using commercial software is illegal. I strongly refuse piracy and I am not responsible of anyone using illegal software. Last but not least I am also not responsible for damage caused by following my tips – use it on your own risk.

Here we go:

Prerequisites:
Get Hiren’s BootCD (I recommend Version 10.6) and burn on a CD-R or use the included scripts to prepare a flash drive from which you can boot up the system.

Prepare your laptop to boot from the BootCD/flashdrive:

• Restart your computer and go into your BIOS setup utility.
• Navigate to the “Boot” page
• For flashdrive set “external device boot” to enabled and put external device to the top of the boot priority list by selecting it and pressing F5.
• For CD put internal optical disk drive at the top of the list.

Booting up the system and connect drives:

• Boot your BootCD.
• A prompt appears. Select “Mini Windows XP” and hit enter.
• After the boot is complete, you find yourself on the Windows XP desktop:

• If you navigate to my computer you should find all the partitions and data on your RAID or Non-RAID HDD/SSDs. You can also check in the device manager under “Disk drives” and properties of your Drive (Volume0 when you have a RAID array) by clicking the populate button in the Volumes tab. In the following screenshot you see the property window for my Z11's 256GB quad-ssd.
  
• In order to backup or restore your system to/from an external hard drive, connect the drive via USB (FireWire was not tested yet due to lack of FW drive, eSATA through an AKE BC338 eSATA-ExpressCard controller did not work for me). After that hit the “Mount Removable” icon on the desktop, your drive should appear in my computer.

Backing up your system:

• Open up the HBCD Menu via the desktop or start menu shortcut and go to Menu – Backup and select your desired backup tool. (Alternatively, you can also start your own software in that system if it contains all needed runtimes)
• As my favourite backup software is the good old Ghost, I take that for demonstration (keep in mind you need the license to use that, if you do not have a license, use one of the other freeware tools provided by Hiren’s BootCD, e.g. DriveImage XML also works pretty well).
• Start Ghost and click through the notifications.
• Backup your complete system disk via local – disk – to image and select your drive, click OK specify the location of the image file and select if you want to use image compression. After that, click yes to start the backup process.
  
• Recover your system via local – disk – from image and go through the process the same way.
• If you only want to backup single partitions, use “Partition” unter local.
• After your Backup/Restore process is finished, just restart your computer and boot from the internal drive (change the BIOS settings or take out your bootcd/flashdrive).
  

If you followed all steps carefully, you should be successful with your backup. With that, it is possible to recover your system very fast (as you can see above, it takes just a few minutes) back to a clean system with ease. Because of that, I decided to abandon my recovery partition since I find the method described more useful.

[beaups]

Funny I was just posting this in another thread. Ghost works flawlessly from PE/BootCD

[Willy330Ci]

Thanks big time for this clear instructions, but I have 1 question:

I understand that the backup method using "Ghost" DISK TO IMAGE is a sector-by-sector IMAGE, which is a very huge Image size if we have the 256GB, so, can we use/do sth. to make the image less in size?

Copying the Disk to an Image using a USB HDD will take a very long time when sector-by-sector method is used.

In simple words, its like copying a 256GB File to a USB HDD which is limited to max 30-50 MB/s.

Thx again.

[pyr0]

Thanks big time for this clear instructions, but I have 1 question:

I understand that the backup method using "Ghost" DISK TO IMAGE is a sector-by-sector IMAGE, which is a very huge Image size if we have the 256GB, so, can we use/do sth. to make the image less in size?

Copying the Disk to an Image using a USB HDD will take a very long time when sector-by-sector method is used.

In simple words, its like copying a 256GB File to a USB HDD which is limited to max 30-50 MB/s.

Thx again.

No, ghost is kinda intelligent and backups your drive not sector-by-sector, it looks on the file system tables (MFT entries) to backup only the existing data. As you can see in the above finish screenshot, I backuped my 256 gig drive with 17 gigs of data in ~12 minutes with fast compression resulting in a 12 gig image on my external HDD. I recovered from that image nearly half a dozen times now and it works wonderful. After a reboot you have a perfectly clean, cloned system.

[Willy330Ci]

@pyr0:

I truly cannot thank you enough, thank you so much friend.

Will

[pyr0]

@pyr0:
I truly cannot thank you enough, thank you so much friend.
Will

You are welcome, I hope that this guide helps folks out there properly backing up their beloved machines without hassle.

[JP$]

You are welcome, I hope that this guide helps folks out there properly backing up their beloved machines without hassle.

I don't have a lot of experience with back ups in general. Can you explain why this method is superior to, say, using Windows' native back up tool? Does this method somehow facilitate restoring the SSDs to their nascent state?

[Willy330Ci]

pyr0, can you give Acronis True Image 2010 a shot?

I Like the Idea of Acronis Recovery Zone, and the Bootable Media that comes with it, and its FAST & EASY, you can use it to backup your SSD into an Image file created on external storage like a USB HDD or sth.

If you can try it (30 Days fully functional) then that would be another solution for plp not acquainted with Ghost.

Will

[arth1]

This is imaging, not backup. The two are different -- when you image a partition, you copy everything, no matter what, but don't have the fine grained control that you have when doing backups.

Ghost is good, but it isn't Ghost anymore with the newest versions -- it's a rebranded Paragon Driveimage. Still good, but you might as well buy "Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 Desktop Edition" instead -- it does the same job as Ghost (compatible images), and adds the ability to do simple backups too.

Personally, for imaging, I prefer to use "dd" from a Linux boot CD. 100% verbatim images no matter what the file system is, and no need to fiddle around with restoring partitions in a certain order to not break boot on multi-boot systems, which you otherwise may have to do with Ghost/BESR. Oh, and it makes it very easy to import the images into a virtual machine -- since dd creates raw data files without a single byte or header added, no support for specific versions of specific image programs is needed by the vm. The dd images will work just as well 10 years from now, when Ghost version 11 support has long since been discontinued.

[beaups]

Ghost in hirens bootcd is actually ghost. And if you do a full disk image, it restores are the partitions, boot sector, etc perfectly.