• Create a custom, bootable recovery partition:
  • Acronis True Image includes Secure Zone, which creates a hidden partition for storing backup images. Accessible at boot time via F11.
  • Ghost Recovery Kit apparently allows for creating a custom recovery partition, but the process looks rather involved.
  • Paragon's Drive Backup 9.0 has a feature called Backup Capsule that creates a hidden partition to store images and allows the user to assign a Function key (F3, for example) to access during boot. This is the only solution I tested, with unfortunate results: at virtually the end of the restore process from Backup Capsule, the screen went blue and the hard drive activity went crazy for over an hour before I had to kill it. Thankfully, I had made an ealier image with Drive SnapShot, which I restored to the hard drive in just a few minutes.
• Creating a custom, bootable recovery DVD:
  • Storing an image on a Bootable ISO with PING
  • How to Create a Restore / Recovery Disc and Partition with Ghost
  • How to create a CD/DVD based image of your hard drive with Acronis True Image: MSFN | Neowin

/windows | Sep 28, 2009