Quite a few manufacturers and vendors of Laptops these days incorporate some kind of roll back, recovery or backup system that allows you to effectively reset the Laptop back to default - this is all well and good, IF, you have really trashed it to the point that it won’t boot at all - but if you want to get back to the way it was after the Corporate SOE was applied or back to the way it was when you had just finished adding all the Apps and had it running just nicely, well that’s a whole other ball game?
Well is it? It’s nice of IBM to provide a nice blue ThinkVantage button - but unless I’ve misread the details in the docs - this will set my Laptop back to a factory default - hardly conducive to productivity? 
So what I have done in the past is cobbled together a few tools to enable me to save an image (Ghost, whatever…) of the laptop to a Local partition so that in an event that leaves me unable to get the beast working correctly, missing System Restore Point, too many installed apps, too many apps being uninstalled, etc. I can simply reboot, pause and choose the E drive and then from there restore using ghost back to a known point.
So how easy is this? Relatively simple.
Grab an Eval of a Partitioning tool and first of all create a D and an E drive. D is where all the Data is going to live so this will typically be the rest of what you have spare, E drive will contain the Ghosted image of C drive so it typically only needs 10Gb or less.
(So on an 80Gb drive you would typically have 15 - 20Gb for C, 10Gb for E drive and D Drive will have 50 - 55Gb)
Now to make it easy we’re not even going to re-install the OS, you don’t need to, but if you do want to make sure you find where all the drivers are before starting because this will save you having to download them from the web later. You will probably find them on the Recovery CD or hidden away in the C drive somewhere?
So essentially the main steps are:
- Partition the disk into 3 drives (C, D and E)
- Format E drive as FAT32 (only needed for DOS version of Ghost32)
- Use a Win98 Bootable CD to SYS E Drive and make it bootable
- Install Ghost (or your choice of Image Utility) in E Drive
- Install a Boot Loader/Switcher Utility (or get funky with Boot.ini?)
- You’re done
I have just followed this method for some time and because it works, it’s simple and it is reasonably fast I haven’t bothered changing my approach for some time - but I’m sure there are a huge number of different ways to do this, and I’m sure there are some who would insist on installing BartPE or similar in the E drive as the bootable system to enable the imaging process - but my point would be that simply using the DOS components of Win98 are far quicker and use less resources - besides, it’s not like we should need the networking - this is essentially a disk-to-disk job?
Others might also want to use Acronis or some other tool, but again, I’m familiar with ghost and at least for me “it does what it says on the tin!”
If you really want to get carried away it’s always possible that you could make this a whole lot simpler if you have an imaging tool like Symantec’s Live State Recovery because then you do away with the whole need to reboot to image - but some while back this product was around the 500 pound mark so it’s a bit serious when all you want to do is image a Laptop?
So - get the partitions sorted, make E Drive bootable, then install the Imaging tool on E drive.
Now continue to “tweak” your laptop for the next few weeks as you install all those tools that you’ve remembered that are absolutely must haves, then when you are happy with it - reboot and redirect the boot to E Drive, image C Drive and store the image on E Drive remembering to set compression on high to save on space.
MAKE SURE YOU NOW STORE ALL YOUR DATA ON D DRIVE!!!!! - this is the whole point of this. Make sure that every time you install an application that the data or output is stored in D Drive - THIS IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT FOR OUTLOOK ETC. MAKE SURE THE *.PST FILES ARE IN D DRIVE!!
You’re done
I have in the past even had a laptop play up on a return from a customer and reflashed the laptop while on the train - I was done and back up and working inside 10 minutes
Please feel free to drop me a note if you have any other ideas or alternatives?
Links to tools:
Tighten up Windows XP (or Vista) and remove all that resource hungry bloat ware? Then build it in to your custom Bootable ISO. XP SP2 can be made as small as 250Mb installed - seriously!!
http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html and http://www.vlite.net/
As it says, find all those tools that deserve a home on your Hard Drive? You can find a few Partitioning Tools here.
http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/
Multiboot tool
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Multiboot-with-GRUB.html
Boot Loader and Imaging software
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/diskdirectorsuite/multibooting.html
My personal choice of bootloader
http://www.osloader.com/
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