Recipe 19.3. Using Automated System Recovery

Problem

You want to back up your Windows XP Professional system state information to a single diskette, and you want to be able to take that data and restore your system to a bootable, functional state with it.

Solution

To back up your Windows XP Professional system state data to an Automated System Recovery (ASR) disk:

1. From the Start Menu, select All Programs Accessories System Tools Backup. The wizard starts by default. Click the Advanced Mode link.

2. Click the Automated System Recovery wizard button.

3. Select the destination for your backup file, and then insert a floppy disk. After the floppy is created, a full backup of your system will proceed. You'll have the opportunity to cancel that if you just want to make the ASR disk.

4. Click Finish.

To restore your system to a bootable state, use the ASR disk:

1. Boot off your Windows XP installation CD.

2. When prompted for an ASR diskette, press F2. Note that this happens right after the blue-tinted screen appears, so watch carefully for it.

3. Insert your ASR diskette. Windows will copy files to your hard drive, and then prompt you to reboot.

Discussion

Using ASR is a great idea when you've simply made a configuration change that has resulted in a system that won't boot. It saves time by not requiring you to restore the entire contents of your hard disk spreadsheets, Word documents, music, movies, and other personal items and only focusing on system configuration data that might have become corrupted or invalid.

You can access the restore portion of ASR by pressing F2 when prompted in the text-mode portion of Windows Setup, which you can access by booting off the Windows CD. ASR will read the disk configurations from the file that it creates in step 3 of the first part of this recipe, and then restore all of the disk signatures, volumes, and partitions on at least the disks needed to boot the computer it will try to restore all disk configurations, but might not be able to do so for a variety of reasons. ASR then installs a simple installation of Windows and automatically starts a restoration using the backup created by the ASR wizard.

If you're a fan of the GUI, in Windows XP Home Edition, you can't use Automated System Recovery (ASR), which limits your backup options. ASR can only be used in Windows XP Professional. To make matters worse, you can actually create a backup using ASR in Windows XP but don't be fooled, because you can't actually restore that ASR backup.

See Also

Recipe 19.4 for creating an ASR disk "after the fact"