Drive Imaging, A Solution to the Support Dilemma

With wholesale improvements at the component level, hardware failure is quickly becoming a reduced concern. Instead, most problems encountered by white-box system builders are now at the software level. Troubleshooting these problems for customers tends to be both tricky and time-consuming. Many system problems are caused by third-party software, viruses, or plain old user ignorance. Yet as a system builder, you cannot afford to alienate your customers. You must correct whatever problems occur and prove that your hardware is not the root cause of the problem.

What to do? That's the question. Drive Imaging is the answer.

Today, most white-box PC and notebook systems come with hard-drive storage capacities approaching hundreds of gigabytes. All that capacity gives you the option of offering backup capabilities on the same hard drives. You do this by partitioning the drive into multiple segments. For instance, if a customer's system has a 60-GB hard disk drive, you could dedicate 10 GB of that to backup purposes. This backup capability can become a key factor in restoring flaky systems to their previous state.

Drive-imaging utilities provide the logical solution to the PC backup dilemma. Imaging products can help you quickly restore a system to a previous state by reloading a snapshot image of the primary partition. The image can be created as the last step of system construction, creating the opportunity to restore a system to its as-shipped configuration.

Commercial imaging products are available from vendors including Symantec and PowerQuest (which was recently acquired by Symantec). You can gain additional benefits from products such as PowerQuest's Drive Image 7 Pro and V2i Protector. These run within the Windows environment and can be harnessed by end users to perform additional backups. Both offer functionality within Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Symantec's Ghost software, by contrast, requires a reboot to DOS mode to perform imaging functions.

Best Practices for Imaging Backups

To deploy imaging as part of your white-box construction process, take several factors into account. First, consider the costs of the imaging software. In most cases the products are available under volume licensing agreements for well under $100 a copy. This initial cost can be offset by offering the imaging/backup capabilities as part of an add-on package. Or you could justify the cost to customers by reducing your support costs. Also, imaging can reduce your assembly costs: You can use a standard install image and then deploy that image to systems being built, instead of going through the time-consuming installation of operating systems and applications on each system.

Drive size is another consideration. That's true especially when it comes to deciding how much space to allocate to backups. Basically, the larger the drive, the larger the portion of the drive that can be assigned to a backup partition. If you need to back-up the initial system configuration, then the backup partition needs to be only about 80% of the size consumed by the systems default configuration.

Why not make both partitions the same size? Because imaging software employs data compression. That can reduce storage needs by as much as 50%, depending, of course, on how compressible the data is.

Don't make the mistake of minimizing the size of the backup partition to give your customers more usable hard-drive space. No room will be available for additional backups. This proves to be short-sighted. You're better off dedicating additional space to backup. This will allow both end-users and tech-support staffers to perform additional image backups. That's a valuable tool when either you or a tech-support person are struggling to understand the cause of a PC failure.

Also, offering customers the ability to self-backup their systems can justify the additional cost of imaging software. In addition, end-users are not limited to just backing up to the backup partition, as external drives and network shares are supported by most imaging products. That can bring further add-on sales in the form of external storage devices, such as USB or Firewire-based storage devices.

Steps to Imaging

Preparing white-box systems for imaging support and performing the imaging and restore process requires several steps. Let's look at each in detail.

Step 1: Partition the drives to properly support imaging solutions.

The partitioning process can be accomplished during the initial OS installation. If you seek to back-up initial configurations, such as Windows XP or a productivity suite, a 10-GB backup partition will provide more than enough space. A little research can help you to establish the ideal partition size.

Drive partitioning can be accomplished either by using partitioning utilities, such as FDISK from Microsoft, or directly with the Windows Setup Wizard. Using FDISK offers the option of creating the backup partition as a FAT32 partition, which can be accessed from a DOS command prompt. This simplifies restorations on systems that won't boot due to an OS problem or primary partition damage. For more information on using FDISK, view this Microsoft Knowledge Base article.

The following image shows you the FDISK page as it should appear on the computer display:

The following image shows you the Windows XP setup page as it should appear on the computer display:

Step 2: Format the partitions, then install an operating system and bundled applications.

Once these tasks are completed, the imaging application can be installed. Installing Drive Image 7, for example, requires little more than inserting the included CD and running the installation wizard.

Another important item to consider is how an image can be restored in the event of a non-bootable system problem. To address that concern, Drive Image 7 includes a bootable CD, which can boot a system into PowerQuest's PQRE environment, a slimmed-down OS that can recognize storage devices to allow a restore to be completed with out having access to the installed operating system. Verify that the hardware you select will be compatible with that option, as PowerQuest only offers limited drive support.

Step 3: Create Automated System Recovery (ASR) disks using the Windows Backup Utility.

This helps you provide your customers with the best in recovery options. The following two screen shots show the Windows recover screen as it should appear on the computer display:

Step 4: Create an initial image.

If you're using Drive Image 7, this can be accomplished by running an image-creation wizard. Operators will need to inform the wizard of the location to keep the image and the name of the image file. The following four screen-shots show the Image wizard as they should appear on your display:

If you'd like to automate the setup process on future systems, copy the initial image created in the previous step to another storage device, such as a network share or a writable CD or DVD disc. Later, you can use this image to deploy additional systems. Or you can include it with the system as a recovery disk.

Recovering Data

Now that we've partitioned the disk, let's look at how it can help you recover data after a system failure.

When you receive a tech-support or warranty service call, one of your first steps is to determine whether the failure was caused by hardware or software. Many software problems can look deceptively like hardware problems. When that's the case, the bundled imaging product can be used to simplify troubleshooting.

You will first need to create a new image of the drive, preferably to another storage device. Take care to not over-write any other images. This step will preserve customer data for later recovery.

After you've backed-up the current configuration to an image, restore the system to its initial shipping state using a restore wizard. Or have the customer follow the needed steps to accomplish the same goal. The following four screen-shots show the restore wizard going through its paces.

After the initial image is restored, you may want to do further testing to validate the hardware. If the hardware checks out, then the customer's image can be restored, and the software problem can be resolved for a fee. Or the customer's backup image can be used to recover just the needed data files after the system is updated to a new configuration.

Disk-Imaging Tips and Tricks

Here are my top tips for disk imaging:

• Position imaging technology as a disaster-recovery product.
• Select an imaging product that supports remote shares and writable media.
• Select an imaging product that can run from within Windows.
• Pre-image a system before shipping it to your customer.
• Define a recovery procedure.
• Encourage customers to image their drives for backup.
• Offer external backup devices such as USB and DVD-R drives.
• Always provide emergency recovery disks.
• Use imaging to streamline system building.

Together, those elements will add up to a successful imaging plan that protects you and your customers alike.

FRANK J. OHLHORST is Technology Editor at CRN.