> The bottom line, is that there is no way to reliably back up your XP system, to guard against H/W failure.

But no, we have a complete image of the drive in question, it's just that the original drive cannot be used, so we have to place the image onto a new physical drive of identical specs. XP copy protection refuses to boot from the new drive. Dead in the water. Time to reinstall.

Sure, the image has EVERYTHING, but doesn't help to avoid the days of reinstalling and repatching and reconfiguring EVERYTHING..

or does it?