Making a full PC backup without Vista Ultimate

Ok so this time I can't find an answer through google and I doubt I will...

So here goes, can I make a full PC backup to an external USB HDD then restore my PC from that USB HDD in the same way I can with the backup and restore facility in Vista Ultimate?

I have an Asus M70VM which came pre-installed with Vista Home Premium SP1, I have a Vista installation disk but unfortunately because it's not an SP1 disk I can't upgrade to Ultimate to take advantage of the backup/restore function, and besides it doesn't work if your dual booting with XP as it'll only restore the Vista OS and not the XP OS as well - tried it before, ballsed up my XP install doing it...

Anyway I have Norton Ghost 14.0 so I'm thinking the procedure would be this - make a backup to an external USB HDD, clean install both OS if I need to restore the backup and then install Norton Ghost and then restore the backup?

My internal HDD is 320 GB and the partitions are 139gb (D:, data storage), 85gb (C:, Vista) and 65gb (E:, XP) so I'm thinking I can't make a recovery DVD that I can just pop in the drive and re-install all 3 partitions?

Thanks in advance for any help/advice on this, I'm kinda without a full OS backup option at the moment and it's taken me a day or so to install my OS's and get all the bits and pieces I want on it...

 

I prefer Acronis True Image over Ghost since ATI has the feature for making a bootable CD that has both Backup and Recovery on it. I believe the Ghost bootable cd only has the Recovery on it so you must have the software installed on the system to do a Backup. Although many True Image users make their Backups without problems from the installed software it's just my preference to do everything from the bootable CD.

And I've also done Backup and Restore of a dual boot system (Vista and XP) in this manner - worked without any problems.

 

The Acronis True Image Home is the way to go. This is possibly the most intuitive piece of backup software out there. Too bad the Enterprise version sucks apples.

 

Yeah it seems easy enough to use, and it come with a recovery cd which Norton Ghost doesn't (you have to make your own from what I read).

I ordered ATI Home 11 yesterday from Amazon, got it today, spent 4 hours waiting for the backup to complete on a USB HDD and now I have a full backup that I should be able to restore from "in case of emergency", with everything I've installed so far.

I'm actually rather annoyed that I've had to shell out £20 for a 3rd party app when I could have just upgraded to Ultimate if M$ didn't make it so you can't upgrade an SP1 OS with a non-SP1 Ultimate disk...

...At least it's not £100-£250 for a new SP1 Ultimate disk though...

 

A few things you might want to look into. Make sure you have the latest build (8101) for ver 11. If you do not, you should register on the Acronis website and that would give you access to build 8101. After you download that build, you should make the bootable Rescue CD after you install build 8101.

With True Image, having made a Backup Image is no guarantee that you will get a successful Recovery. To be absolutely sure of a 100% successful restore, you have to do a restore, preferable to a spare hard drive. If that is not an option for you (no spare drive available) do a "dry run" with the bootable CD right up to the window with the Proceed button, then Cancel out, otherwise the recovery process will run. But even this will only be a 90% guarantee the Backup you made will restore okay. You should also validate the Backup Image again using the bootable cd. If it validates okay then you're up to a 95% guarantee that the Image will restore okay.

 

Looks like you've already found my suggestion as well - Acronis True Image Home is a very useful little bit of coding.