That’s what one of my hard drives did last night. Got 2 SATA drives in a RAID0 stripe. So one goes and the whole system goes.

However, it’s limping along just well enough that I’m online and making sure I have everything backed up properly just in case. Soon we’ll find out how well Vista’s whole drive backup works. Theoretically I put in the new drives, stick in the Vista CD, and then select restore at some point and give it my backup external drive. Then everything should restore exactly as I had everything just last week.

*Update*

1. Went to Circuit City and picked up 2 new SATA drives. 30min.
2. Removed existing hard drives. 5 min.
3. Installed two new drives into the case. 5 min.
4. Turned on system and configured new RAID configuration on the drives. 2 min.
5. Boot off Vista DVD. 3 min.
6. Selected Repair, Restore from Full Drive Backup. 1 min.
7. Mowed grass. 1 hour.
8. Booted up system from bare metal restore. 2 min.

Now I’m working just where I left everything off on the last backup from 1 week ago.  Exactly.  Wonderfully.

So can XP do this? Linux do this? Mac? Anything else? Bare metal, full drive, exact bit by bit restore with nothing more than the installation DVD and an external hard drive that you made the backup on. Sorry, none of those do it without extra software. Mac apparently comes close, but Time Machine doesn’t quite cut it apparently.

All you Vista haters should take a lesson from this. This was one of my most impressive and easiest to handle emergencies in all my years working in IT.

Sure with Vista you need newer hardware. Go back to a Pentium III with 128mb of RAM with a new release of Linux and see if you can get all the new bells and whistles going. Of course you can’t.

I’m trying to get Ubuntu 8.04 working with an old laptop. It has a old Linksys WPC54G PCMCIA wireless card. Doesn’t work. The instructions tell you first get a network connection. WTF? That’s what I’m trying to get enabled damnit. You can’t just download what you need on another system even. Just pathetic. I know Linux, used it for years. Desktop replacement? Not quite there yet…

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