In news:kxVok.42446$E41.22617@text.news.virginmedia.c om,
Tony typed:
> I want to create an ASR in case of problems when installing SP3. But
> it seems that ASR insists on copying pretty well the whole contents
> of my C drive. It certainly does all of "My Documents" and "Shared
> Documents", so I would need media capable of holding 50+ GB. This is
> fine if you have a tape drive or a spare HD installed, which I don't.
> But I already have full backups of my own data on DVD and USB drive. All I
> need from ASR is the system files. So, can I stop the ASR
> wizard backing up "My Documents" and "Shared Documents"? Or is there
> another way to be able to get the system working again if all goes
> wrong? What do other folks do? Personal document backup and system
> backup are not the same thing after all. --
> Tony W
> My e-mail address has no hyphen
> - but please don't use it, reply to the group.

I use a boot CD like BartPE (its free) and then I have access to all files
and folders on the hard drive and none of them are locked. And I can copy
only the parts of the hard drive I want to backup. I have also used this
method to copy everything to a new hard drive. And then boot up from the new
drive. I've done backups and copies this way since the Windows 3.1 days.

--
Bill
Gateway Celeron M 370 (1.5GHZ)
MX6124 (laptop) w/2GB
Windows XP Home SP2 (120GB HD)
Intel(r) 910GML (64MB shared)