How to create a restore disk?

[Aliasbuck]

I gave an old computer to my Aunt last fall and despite my best attempts at education on spyware and e-mail security and such, she still has managed to get things fouled up a few times.  Completely understandable since this is her first ever computer and she's 70 years old, so I'm quite proud of her for having learned as much as we did.  She has even done some trouble-shooting with me on the phone - right down to opening up the box and re-seating the video card (last fall, we started with: This is the mouse, this is the power button type stuff).

Despite that, it's not exactly easy to describe to her how to clean up and/or do a reinstall of the software on her PC outside of "get someone who knows what they're doing to fix it for you"  Naturally - that's me, but I'm halfway across the country.  So far so good, because I've been able to do it for her when visiting, however that also means she needs to wait until I do or mail it to me.

So, I think my solution when she visits during the holidays is to create a restore disk like a real computer company does, so that she can just stick that in and start from scratch again.  Problem is, I have no idea how to build such a thing, so help!

[Zekester]

Since it's an older PC, why not just use WindowsXP as your "restore disc"?

It should have all the drivers needed, and I believe it's firewall is "on" by default.

Of course, she'll still need an anti-virus program.

[dangerballs]

The easiest way to do what you're asking is to create a ghost image of the drive when it is clean.  You could do it several ways:

The easiest would be to use Ghost to create the image on several CDs or another disk drive and then restore from those cds or another hard disk.  

You could also do a base install and then ZIP that install, put it on a bootable DVD that has some sort of autoexecuting batch files that has commands to format the drive and then unzip the zip file onto the disk.

Using the XP disk as mentioned before is good, but drivers could be a problem, especially obscure hardware drivers.  If her computer only has standard hardware, then you would be good to go with that if she is behind a router.  If she isn't, then I would worry about outside intrusion.  An unpatched XP setup only takes an average of 20 minutes to become infected from the time it is connected to the internet.

[RookieCAF]

I always liked Powerquests Driveimage Pro I think it was, which I heard has been gobbled up by Norton and is more or less Ghost 9.0 now.

[Jeff]

I always liked Powerquests Driveimage Pro I think it was, which I heard has been gobbled up by Norton and is more or less Ghost 9.0 now.

Yep, the Symantec page for Ghost now even says "with DriveImage technology"

Acronis has a cool util that I use for this called TrueImage. It will even create a hidden partition on your HD, and "hide" the Image in there. If the person screws up their system, the program will restore the C: partition from that hidden partition.  It will burn the image to a CDRW/DVD as well.

www.acronis.com

[Aliasbuck]

Thanks all - now to learn how to use this thing by the time my Aunt gets here - at least it's 6 weeks away!