Ghosting a program
 

One for the tech gurus.

On my laptop i have a program which i no longer have the installation cd's for and can not aquire them.

I want to reinstall windows again since the computer is running laggy and im thinking theres lots of spyware etc etc on there so ican have a fresh start.

is there any way of ghosting the program etc without ghosting the whole HDD, since i dont want to ghost all the spyware etc.

cheers.

Really depends on the program, some programs write so many entries into the registry that it's impossible to do what your asking (i.e wont run) but there are others which just install files into the install folder (letting you copy/paste).

No real way to know until you try..

download a fresh copy of the program via torrents?

this torrent is impossible to get :P

its the CAT (CATERPILLAR) SIS master program with all their engine data etc, its for my brother, he uses it for work, he is a heavy diesel technician working in the mines.

Acronis TrueImage Home

Got all my machines imaged, has a boot loader too - Which means if Windows fucks up, you just choose 'fix' when your computer boots and hey presto, it's a brand new clean install!

Also, depending on your laptop - They tend to come from the factory with a backup partition similar to what i have mentioned above, so if Windows becomes unrecoverable, you can just rebuild it to how it was when you first got it.

R.

WISE would do it too.

I can see why you want to backup CAT SIS though, cool program. Maybe pm getagrip and see if he can "find" the latest copy laying around at his work ;)

the truth is i already have the cd's.

the same cd's were used to install the current copy but i cant seem to get them to install on another program, keeps coming ip with error message that i dont have the language pack.

i have a few choices, find programs to clean the laptop of crap, learn how to install CAT SIS or ghost it.

CAT SIS relies on activation keys usually only acquired from Caterpillar themselves.

As for the language pack issue, try chaning your regional settings to English US that used to work for me in my SOE building days.

oh i see, hmm will give that a go.

already have a username and password

I would doubt that a program like that would be heavily integrated into the window system files and registry.

I would recommend an experiment before you continue.

Get into the registry and find the main registry entry for it and export it out to a file.

Copy the contents of the program folder and registry entry to a CD and then transfer it to a different computer. Copy the CD contents across into the same directory path as it was installed in the original computer. Run the registry file to import the registry entries into the new computer's registry. Run the executable. And cross your fingers. Test full functionality of the program to make sure it doesn't try to refer to a missing DLL file or something.

If it works, then you should be able to go ahead with a full reformat. using the burnt CD as a backup of that program.