As a few of you know, the hard drive on my machine recently became
flaky. Sadly, although one of the bad sectors was in files I didn't care
about, the other was somewhere critical (probably my boot sector), and
my machine crashed and burned. The people at Dell had me do various
unhelpful things, until they had me do a diagnostic, which showed
unrecoverable errors on the drive. Not a problem they said, they'd ship
me a new drive. Which, to their credit, they did promptly.

When I went to recover my machine from my backup (my most recent
backup), I discovered to my shock and horror that XP would not even look
at my external hard drive. And it insisted on formatting the internal
drive, without fail, before attempting a restore from backup. It would
have accepted a CD, provided that I could fit my entire system with
files, onto just 1 CD. (My Microsoft S/W alone, without user data, is
over 2Gig.) It would not look at my DVD drive. It would have accepted
multiple floppies. Only... quick calculations show that I would have
needed perhaps 60,000 floppies to back my machine up. Since about 1 in
10,000 can be expected to fail, even with the truck-load, I would never
have been able to restore successfully.

It was a complete shock to me, that I could be so suckered by the backup
system. (Yes, I had tested that I could do a restore shortly after I got
my system, but that was from a working system, to a working system, with
_the same H/W_.)

Mark Lord (Real-Time Remedies) was wonderful. He wrote me a driver,
sucked all the recoverable data off my sick drive, & gave me a copy of
Knoppix (CD Linux) to boot my system with.

One of my first priorities, was to try to figure out how to successfully
do not just backups, but also _restores_! I rather wanted to have a
strategy in place, before invested gobs of time restoring my data. This
has certainly been a learning experience for me, and some of you, may
want to learn from my experience, rather than learning it for yourself.

I can successfully block copy (byte copy) an image of my XP system onto
an external drive. I can even restore it, but only onto the same drive.
Attempts to restore it to another drive, trigger XP's copy protection.
XP runs a checksum on the serial numbers of over a dozen bits of H/W on
your system. (eg. harddrive, CPU, video card, any number of things you
might want to eventually upgrade, or might break from moving parts.) If
you change any of those parts, it insists that you re-install _all_ your
S/W, and rebuild your system from scratch.

I searched the web & all the XP reference manuals Chapters had for sale
(in 2 locations, different selections), for any clue of how to restore a
system when all you have is an image of the flat files system. (My old
drive just wouldn't even get up far enough to run any repairs, and ...
copying files off it with an NTFS resusitator was finding more & more
hard errors, each separate time it was run. I didn't have a hope of
getting a system up long enough to create another backup. I did have a
flat image of the system stored on an external drive.) I found a nice
hack to swap versions of Windows on the same machine, but... it
contained no instructions on how to reset the H/W checksums, & simply
noted that if your hard drive crashed, you had big problems, would have
to replace your disk. Many of the manuals noted that the Home version (I
have Pro) of XP doesn't even default to loading the backup S/W; this was
attributed to Microsofts perception that home users won't care if they
have to rebuild their system. All the sources noted that the built-in
backup would not back up your S/W, that you'd have to re-install all
that. (And re-configure it too.)

Note that none of this is a bug: Microsoft's licence specifically states
that you are permitted one and only one backup copy of it's S/W, and
that if you have installation CDs, then those are your backup.

Having concluded that there was no way of fully restoring the OS, S/W
and all, I decided to try to focus on how to recover my userids and all
of the setting they have. (I was figuring that for future restores, I
could at least do that, off a backup.) Although it did initially appear
that I might be able (with serious poking and prodding) to create new
userids with the same names as my old ones, and swap out the files from
underneath them, some things didn't quite work right. Then I discovered
that Microsoft inserts into some of it's files, nice little directives
indicating that portions of the files should be deleted on copy. And
sure enough, entire chunks of files will disappear, if they are copied.

Which is when I threw in the towel.

Note that large corporations, can get a different type of licence, which
allows them to create standard images and distribute those, S/W & all to
their machines. Which would be why Microsoft doesn't have to care about
restore complaints from corporate customers.

But for ordinary people, trying to use a machine either at home or at a
small business, there's no hope. I observe that any small business that
went through what I just went through, would be lucky to survive
financially.

The bottom line, is that there is no way to reliably back up your XP
system, to guard against H/W failure. It is just a matter of time,
before some component (eg. hard drive) fails. Since most of the power of
XP comes from the customizations you can do, you're forced to choose
between alotting time & resources to do all of the reconfiguring over
again, preiodically, as things break or need replacing. Or avoid using
the full power of XP. Which promptly begs the question, "Why are you
using that operating system?"

All I can do at this point, is share this experience as far and as
widely as possible, and hope that others avoid the mistake of investing
anything at all, into an XP system.

Please spread the word.

(Yes, I'm looking into migrating to Linux).