Back up data and reinstall OS on the fly

Over the weekend my roommates computer had been acting funny, Possibly infected with maleware. Im far to lazy to investigate the situation further so I suggest we just back up her important data and reload the machine.

I decided I wanted to try something new instead of just backing up the data one thing at a time and burning to a disk & reloading Windows XP via cd and taking all the time of installing update and software. --Again im extremely lazy and want this to be done with as quickly as possible--

I borrowed a 200GB external hard drive from work, partitioned the drive 100GB NTFS file system and 100GB ext4 file system. Granted I dont need all this hard disk space, but I wanted to make sure I would have plenty of room to backup the entire drive. Copied a generic syspreped clonezilla image to the ext4 partition.

I then booted the infected machine from a modified Ubootcd (Ultimate Boot Compact Disk). 

Started a program called Drive Image XML and began making a backup of the drive to the external hard drive on the NTFS file system. This process took about a half hour, but this all depends on how much data is being backed up. Once the backup was completed I made sure to check that all the data was visible on external drive and rebooted the machine & booted off a clonezilla live disk.

The newest release on clonezilla live booted and autodetected the external hard drive, recognizing both the NTFS partition and the EXT4 partition. Once clonezilla was booted I choose clonezilla mode -- local device -- restore disk -- and selected the ext4 partition that had the image on it and began the imaging processes. 

This process took about 10 minutes and when finished it rebooted and started the Windows XP mini setup just like a fresh install from cd, typed in the 25digit product key and windows booted to the desktop with sp3, antivirus and all the other software I thought would be needed. 

Windows XP detected the NTFS partition on the external hard drive and I then began to copy the important data back to the computers internal hard drive. -- This process took the longest of any --

Total from start to finished I spent approximately an hour and a half, this might sound like a long time but if you have ever tried backing up data to disk and reloading windows from cd and then copying the data back. You'll know this process has cut the time down from four plus hours to just over an hour.

Equipment Needed:

USB external hard drive with two partitions - NTFS & EXT4

Ultimate Boot CD with Drive Image XML

Clonezilla Live Disk

Generic image or image specific to the machine