I have Windows 7 ultimate installed on my C drive with different utilities and all of my games including steam, about 60 games on my D drive. But what worries me is if I have to reinstall Windows 7 incase a problem arises that will need a reinstall. I know that all of my programs are tied to the registry and they will all need reinstalled too but is there anyway I can format my C drive, reinstall Windows 7 and not have to reinstall all of the programs,games on my D drive? Thanks for any help and replies, these forums are invaluable.
I'm pretty sure backing up the registry works as long as your drive letter and folder names remain the same after reformat. Here's some pics of how to do that, order is left to right:
Get another hard drive and install to that, then you always have the old setup to copy from. Some games may work, some can be cracked (if you are ok with it) and some need to be re-installed.
Do you have backups of your games/utilities/etc already on another drive? If so, then re-install will only take as much time as you want to put everything back.
Acronis True Image. Worth it's weight in gold. I image my C drive once a month and never worry about a re-install. Worst comes to worst, I have an image of a virgin Win7 install , updated to Dec. '09 and no drivers installed. 10 minutes from popping the boot disc in to booting from the recovered o/s. Sliiiick. Just make sure you use a boot disc, cause doing it from Windows, when your backing up your O/S drive is asking for trouble. Even though I've never had a problem. If Acronis doesn't float your boat, Norton still makes Ghost I think. There may be free options as well, not sure about that. Google is your friend.
Agreed with above, Acronis is a great backup tool. I've never had a problem backing up while in Windows, but restoring images while in Windows can be a nightmare. The rescue boot disk works great and can access images saved to NTFS drives.
I have Acronis True Image and I think it's the best program. I also have an image of a virgin Win7 install updated with the latest Windows Update files.
