Image your system with free Macrium

With Macrium you could do that - provided the D partition has enough room. D is usually the recovery partition and is small.

I would, however, recommend you get an external disk (e.g. 500GB). They are very cheap these days. Imaging on the same disk will not be of any help when your disk breaks.

I cannot answer the question regarding Windows7 imaging. I never use it. It gave me nothing but problems.

sunnystaines said:

WHS

thanks for the reply, waiting now to see if anyone replies on w7 image question.

can a laptop be booted up from a cd on a usb cd/vdv drive?

1. It depends on what the d; partition is. In most cases it is a small recovery partion, in which case it will be too small and you also need it to recover your system if anything goes wrong. So no I think you will need an external USB HDD for your backups.

2. A laptop can be booted from an attached USB DVD drive provided the BIOS supports it.

sunnystaines said:

kado
what do i look for in the bios to see if it supports an external dvd player please & usb hdd

I don't really know on your system. On my HP laptop I was able to get at the boot menu on startup and see that I could boot from HDD and USB sticks and once I got an external USB DVD drive (my internal one was playing up) it was just there for selection. On some systems I know you have to go into the bios first to set the boot order but I don't know your laptop. Maybe a read of your manual will help or perhaps someone else will be able to give you advice.

As kado says, if you go into the boot order, it will be pretty obvious. Unfortunately every mobo has a different function key to get there and on an HP it is the ESC key to tap when you power-on. But it should be mentioned on the BIOS splash screen.

You are welcome. I hope you get it sorted.