Better Safe Than Sorry -Phred Co-

[koØm]

Thinking about making a bootable copies of my Win7 and Win8 installations before the Win10 install.

After Win10 is installed, add the backup drive and hope for dual boot capabilities; if I don't like Win10 I can go back to my old installation.

.

[K0RGR]

Don't just make the backup, verify that you can, in fact, reinstall from it.

[NY4Q]

This works great. I've used it often.

https://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

[WØTKX]

I know of many people that use the Paragon stuff.

I've been using a paid version of Partition Commander for a long time. One of it's myriad of toys is a stupid fast way to find/resize partitions on drives, and set things up for a quick image of any drive on the system. I have a fresh blank drive ready to go for the upgrade. Toying with the idea of doing an image to the new drive first, then upgrading on top of it.

The new drive is bigger and faster than the current boot drive running Win7Pro 64bit. Imagine that.

That's the main PC. I have a laptop ready to go, and my wife's laptop as well.
One other Win 7 Home edition won't agree to being a real copy of Windows.

Working that out with MicroCenter, it's one of their refurbs with an OEM version of Windows.

[kb2vxa]

You absolutely positively gotta backup everything before you "upgrade" to a new GUI for an old Windblows or there's a good chance you'll be sooo-rry. Eh, W8.1 just buried stuff in W7 making it more difficult to get at, nothing new and my guru being one of the lab rats said 10 is likable but no big improvement. All this has me thinking that until NT (New Technology) came along Windblows was only a GUI for DOS, then it became a stand alone system. BTW, if you look deep enough it still has imbedded software from Year One.

I have a whole bunch of toys to play with but haven't used partitioning stuff. I don't need partitions with W7 Ultimate, XP virtual and software on primary drive C and libraries on secondary data drive D. Once a month I deep scan everything for malware (normal scheduled scans daily) and run Active@ Disk Image creating separate compressed image backups of both on a removable HDD, but first move last month's backups to a USB3 HDD. Of course just in case a drive fails I have my bootable tools CD handy so I can format a new HDD and then use my recovery CD to restore everything. You never know with Micro$haft, once upon a time an "upgrade" gummed up the works and Godzilla would have been dead in the water without backup at the ready.

-Phred Co- is dead, without backup may it rest in pieces.

[WØTKX]

Correct. NT was a "ground up" OS (for the most part) and everything later came from that.

The 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit transitions were pretty cranky. Thunking sucks.

It got a lot better with the Windows Server 2000 / Windows 7 world.

We shall see how this goes. But I'm gonna wait till the dust settles.

Like maybe next week.

[NY4Q]

Correct. NT was a "ground up" OS (for the most part) and everything later came from that.

it seems I remember this stuff called 'OS/2' that NT sprouted from...?

[KG4CGC]

Wait wut? Is W10 a routine random government ordained forced feeding of a new OS?

[KG4NEL]

My thoughts on upgrading from 7 will include something along the lines of "my cold dead hands".