How to create a restoration disk?

[bragss2]

I reformat my hdd every 4-6 months to avoid any issues with viruses. I have quite some softwares installed on my machine. Every time I reformat my hdd, a lot of time is wasted in re-installing all the softwares. Is there a way around this?.....like creating a dvd which can be used to bring the system back to its original state before fomatting.

[Krazy Bluez]

you can try acronis true image disk creator home edition,as it can make a generated image of the whole os with softwares so that if your os gets corrupted then also it can make full change and return it to the default state, but you should notice that it is not free

[VarDOS]

I Have A Great Solution Use Norton Ghost.

U Have 2 Do The Following Thing.

First Install All The Softwares And OS.Make Ghost Of It,Then When U Have Formatted The HDD. Insert U R Ghost CD/DVD. Within 10-20min U R PC Will Be Recovered, With All The Softwares.

[sanyaldk]

thats right !! use norton ghost.

[bragss2]

Thanks Guys!! I will give norton ghost a try.

[pimpom]

I stringly second the suggestion of Norton Ghost. Been using it for years now. I use the basic DOS version that came bundled with a motherboard driver. It does not work in Windows, so I created a DOS boot disk from Windows 98 (still using copies of that long after I stopped using Win98). I store the Ghost backup file on a hard disk partition.

A few tips:
Besides installing the OS and other softwares, set all settings to your liking before making a Ghost backup. This saves a lot of time after re-installation.

Relocate My Documents in a non-OS partition. This avoids having to back up data when formatting the OS partition.

Copy browser bookmarks to another parition before formatting.