XP backup to create system recovery disc

littlemoney

I have a 5 year old Dell inspiron 6400 laptop with XP Pro SP3. Having had a close scare recently and thought my computer had died. I decided do a full back and create a system recovery disc. From time to time I backup my files and folders to my seagate external hard drive but not the rest of the system information and programmes

I used the backup wizard in xp pro and selected the option "all information on this computer and create a system recovery disc". When I checked later I found that it was trying to include in the backup everything that was already on my external drive.

How can I exclude the external drive from the backup and still create a recovery disc.

macman

Unplug the external drive while creating the disk image. But you should be able to specify which drive to create a disk image from.

closed

forget the xp backup wizard, do a disk image backup (not clone) with one of these, and create the boot cd to enable you to do an easy restore in future

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

disk image option

http://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-drives/consumer-electronics/ld25-series/maxblast-master-dl/

also backup the most important data to dvd