[ale] If you must restore a windows computer, how do you make it better?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 14:36 -0400, Richard Bronosky wrote:
> My MiL had a hard drive failure in her Dell windows media center
> machine. (which does not have a tuner card and serves not media center
> purpose, but the Dell sales person up-sold her) I have recovered the
> data using my Linux desktop and a drive dock. I now must consider what
> to do with the bones.
> 
> She will not use anything other than windows. End of story. Moving
> on. 

What I tell *everyone* is this:  I'll set them up with a Windows
instance, if that is what they want and they have all the materials for
it (license/certificate/etc.) and once it's all said and done, I'll take
an image with it, make two copies, and give them both copies.

I use ntfsclone to do the images, because it has an efficient file
format that is portable (e.g., it does not depend on sparse files,
though you can safe an NTFS image as a sparse file if you want).
Typically, a fully setup Windows XP Professional installation with the
software that users tend to have installed (Firefox, OpenOffice,
whatever they may have and want installed, Flash, etc.) fits on two 4.7
GB DVDs if you do not compress the NTFS image file, and of course you
can restore with ntfsclone itself.

>From thereonin, I tell people, "If you think you cannot lose it, make
sure you back it up, or assume it's gone already."  If that doesn't do
it, the "I told you so," after I use the images to restore and their
data isn't present, generally (though not always!) does.

	--- Mike

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