John,

Question #1

... rather than the boot-from-CD part that I prefer ...

I also would prefer to make my backup when the OS I'm going to backup isn't
running. Call me daft, but I do not really trust "shadow" copies. Just one
file out of sync and you're the pisang.

For the _restore_ from image, you boot from the CD you make

In my case I would probably use an USB stick, as more-and-more 'puters have
USB support, but do not always have a CD/DVD drive.

And to be honest, that is where my idea of pre-configuring came from: Where
you can't store/change user configuration data on a CD, it should be no
problem for an USB stick.

.... on the other hand, CDs cannot easily be altered, which is a big pre when
dealing with infected computers.

It can of course include your D: partition too, though I would back that
up differently.

Same here, and its something I'm already doing: just copying (with some
filtering and a twist) the files to an external USB drive.

My best-case scenario would be to use the same disk to boot and run the
backup/restore program from, and store the backup of the OS partition on.

I don't think this can be totally automated (you have to point it at
_which_ image you want to restore, for a start)

Not quite. It could show the backupped images in order of the oldest
first, and pre-select it. :-)

... but it's pretty trivial.

It always is... up until the moment you're in a it-should-be-running-NOW
stressfull situation, and you try to remember what the heck the program is
actually asking you. :-(

Question #2:

Obviously, _no_ system is going to run without loading an OS first.

Obviously, which is why I asked. What does it need to be able to do a
restore ?

Mind you, even a DOS program could restore backuppped sectors to a
partition - regardless of filesystem. Mostly the hard part is, at backup
time, to determine which sectors need, and which do not need to be placed in
the backup.

The MS system backup - I'm not sure if that's the one you've found - ...

What I've been attented to and found is the program NtBackup.exe in the
c:\windows\system32 folder.

... requires you to have a Windows CD to boot from before you can use any
image you've saved with it

Well, there goes that idea/program (apart from it backing up a running
system) ...

I don't _think_ there's a built-in one in XP

The above one seems to be part of XPsp3. That is, I can't remember having
installed it myself (my current installation is just over year old).

Thanks for the reply and macrium usage instructions.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser