When your hard drive dies, you would normally need to go through the process of reinstalling your operating system and programs. If you are lucky, and have prepared yourself for a disaster, you might even be able to restore your data. One thing that you are not able to restore are all of the customisations you have done to your system.

Any way you look at it, it is going to take you the best part of a day to have your system up and running again, and weeks before you get everything back just how you like it.

The system restore options in Windows are great for restoring a malfunctioning system back to a fully working state, but they do not work when your hard drive calls it a day.

Plan ahead for such a disaster by saving an “image” of your computer. An image is a compressed file that contains the entire contents of a hard drive. Windows, programs, hardware drivers, settings and data are all backed up in the image. If your hard drive dies, or gets cluttered with rubbish, you are able to restore your system, and restore so that it is exactly the same as it was when you saved the image.

Clonezilla is a program that will do just that. You can save your entire computers contents into a single file. You can then burn the file to a DVD for safe keeping. You will want to read the documentation so that you can find out how to store a copy of Clonezilla on your DVD, and how to make the DVD bootable. This way you will have everything on hand to restore your computer, on the one disk.

Restoration of the image is likely to take less than one hour. Probably closer to 10 minutes. This is a big improvement to a whole days work. There is nothing else that needs to be done, except to restore your incremental document backups. You can save an incredible amount of time if you want to restore the image to numerous computers.

If you are happy with the way your system is running, it is a good time to make your image. In the case that you need to restore it, you don’t wasn’t to restore an image created while your system was not running at its optimum. You will be very thankful that you made the backup in the long term… or possibly even the short! Hard drives are one of the least reliable components of any computer system.

There are a number of programs that will do this same task. Many companies use the commercial package from Norton called Ghost. It basically does the same thing, it just looks a little nicer and costs money.

Clonezilla is available for free from SourceForge.

There are a number of background items that load up as you start up Windows. This includes programs that are in your startup folder as well as some utilities loaded up by the registry. MSConfig is a utility that comes with Windows that we can use to disable some of these startup items, but it only tells us half the story. There are many more items that load at startup.

Autoruns is a program available from Microsoft that will show you every item that loads at startup. I was amazed to see just how many there were. They can be broken down into groups or seen as a whole. All you need to do it untick the items you don’t want to load.

It would be tempting to untick every box as it will make the machine fly, but take caution as the machine may not be very useful, or in the worst case, not boot anymore. Use this program with a bit of self control. If you don’t know what something is, you probably need it.

There is a nice feature that lets you remove Microsoft items from the lists. There are a lot of them so hiding them lets you get down the the nitty gritty problems of third party applications.

Autoruns has been available for a long time but a new version was released earlier this month. It is a perfect companion to run alongside Bootvis. It works on all Windows platforms and is available for free from Microsoft’s Technet.

There are a number of reasons why we might set a password to protect our BIOS from changes. The problem is that we only need to go in there once in a blue moon, making the password easy to forget, locking everyone out.

I had a situation many years ago where a colleague suggested the purchase of a new motherboard because they couldn’t remember the password. I got that little bit more frustrated with my job that day.

There are various options you can use to get back into your BIOS. All of them reset the BIOS back to default values, so make sure you’ve tried all of your regular passwords before attempting these methods. I have tried to keep it brief…

Newer Computers: Most newer motherboards have a jumper on them, which you can change the position of to reset the BIOS. Find your motherboard manual or search for the motherboards model number in Google. You want to find a diagram showing what and where various components and jumpers are on the motherboard. The manual should tell you which jumper needs to be changed.

Once you have changed the jumper, return the jumper back to its original position while the machine is off. You don’t want it to keep resetting itself. Turn on the machine and go into the BIOS. All options will be open to you.

Older Computers: The quickest way to get into the BIOS of an older computer that has been password protected is to remove the battery. The battery keeps the system clock going. Once you remove it, you can put it back in and start the computer.

When you start your computer, you will find your BIOS has been reset to its default values. You are now able to change any settings you want.

General: Some motherboard manufacturers have a secret password that will work, overwriting the password already locking the computer. These are readily available online with a bit of a search. I think this is becoming less common with time.

For more information on the methods above, tech-faq has a great article which goes more in depth.