How to Backup and Recover Windows 7 from Blueray BD-RE(rewritable)
Having a good backup and recovery plan is a must for every systems admin, but every day users can greatly benifit from a little preventive maintenence. I for instance, only use Windows for games; every time a hard drive fails or ‘Windows recovery’ wipes out my MBR I have to start from scratch. So this last week after getting a Direct X, ATI, Windows 7 ‘Blue Screen of Death’ for the third time in three monthes I made the wise decision to replace the disk and install Windows 7 from scratch.
The Windows 7 installation itself goes pretty smooth, but the patches, drivers, direct X and game setup triples the time to reinstall. The easiest thing to do is make a image of fresh install with your favorite default apps and settings. Overall I like Windows 7, but it’s still a ways off from Linux and OSX in terms of price, stability and tools, but the ISO backup is a great built-in feature.
For my setup I’m using a LG 12x burner and 22.5 GB BD-RE(rewritable) disk. I like BlueRay BD-RE, they burn up to like 44 GB disks. Even at $10.00(for the 22.5 GB) a disk, that’s a cheap easy successor to Tape drives. BD-RE’s supposedly last much long than DVD-RW, but obviously not as long as tape drives.
Goals of this Post:
– Use Windows 7 recovery console to create an image of a fresh install
– Recover to New Hard Disk
– Expand Logical Volume to fit new Hard Drive