You and Dave have given me much to think about. I've been
oriented toward rebuilding the OS if necessary (and I think
it still has merit) but I'm going to go back and reexamine
the whole idea. The idea of booting from a backup without
cracking the case sounds good (doesn't take long to open
the case, but I think we all hate it; I certainly do -- seems
to take weeks to get it back together).
I have to back up about 3 gigs to capture my full operating
environment. But at todays prices, that's not a great big
deal from an economic point of view. I once looked into
mirroring the boot drive with NT mirroring, but as usual
NT throws up a bunch of barriers to recovery.
There would be other issues with the boot disk and disk
configurations if you tried to "manually mirror" the
OS partition. I don't know whether they could be overcome
or not offhand -- will have to think that through.
You CAN'T generally copy NT from place A to place B and
boot from B. even if B's on the same drive as A. Or at
least I can't. Been there, tried that, failed. Maybe
there's something you can tweak I haven't tried, though
(I tweaked the obvious things like boot.ini).
No, I have no experience with bootable CDs. My bios nominally
supports CD booting, but I guess I don't have a bootable one
and I have never attempted to make one. You can't boot
NT from a read-only medium, though (that is, the nt directory
can't be read only) because of the registry hives and a couple
of log files. I haven't tried this myself, but a colleague of
mine reports it won't work. His plan, incidentally, was to
backup the NT directory to CDRom then restore it and reboot
after a crash. Trouble is, it won't boot because all files
come off the CD as read-only, and NT insists on writing in
a few of them.
Must run now. Continue this later.
Spots
PS. I've been eyeing Drive Image ads in mail catalogs <GGG>.
Dave is corrupting me. |
