I mentioned to a friend of mine, Matt, that I needed to somehow ghost my shiny new Windows installation from the SATA array to some other drive as a backup. I’m used to doing it with Symantec Ghost, but last did that when Ghost ran from a DOS diskette. Yeah, ages ago in other words. Matt promptly introduced me to BartPE – a Live CD Win32 environment. Feed it a source CD/directory tree with a recent Windows XP/2000/2003 installation (source, not installed to C:\Windows), stick any plugins in the SCSIAdapter or nic directories, add any additional software via a third directory and let it rip. One 156 MB ISO image, burnt to CD and booted. After a bit of a wait, one Win32 environment, Ghost 8, a RAID array and an 80 GB drive were available. Click, click, click, ghost done. 1 GB/minute.
Thanks Matt!