imaging PCs and making custom restore DVD

[asteroid]

Hi,

I have PC I have just rebuilt which is all working great, rather than next time I need to reinstall from scratch having to install XP, drivers, 83 odd updates, antivirus then all my apps.

I want to take an image of the machine using Ghost or similar, then make a self booting DVD that restore a machine from beginning. I have 4 PCs I want to sell and all of them have legal Windows product keys but no original CDs, so this would be ideal to supply the new owner if they need to reinstall the OS.

Anyone got ideas of what I should get? Ghost, or maybe Acronis True Image I have been told can do this? Needs to be easy to use, and finished DVD should be easy enough for a novice PC user to to operate themselves.

[Coops]

I personally would go for Ghost but thats just my preference due the fact its the one i know most about. This would be able to make a self booting CD that would restore itself so could fit your requirement.

[system7]

I've been using a ghost clone to restore from a second partition for ages. Even made a batch file to automate it with a bootable floppy.
http://www.dexplor.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=7747397

Recently, Seagate (DiscWizard) and Maxtor (MaxBlast) support have been supplying a free Windows Acronis app that will make a bootable CD, that I use these days to restore a disk image from a second partition.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/

Making a complete restore DVD would need a bit more work. I'm not sure the freeware version of Acronis will do it, but you don't know till you try.