Re: Hard drive mirror/back-up question.
As is typical of microsoft products, this is really easy to do
In XP Pro the tool is automatically installed and its under start/all programs/accessories/system tools and is called 'backup'.
On XP home, insert your cd...unless you've fiddled with your cd settings you should get the 'welcome to xp home' menu...if not, double click on 'my computer' and then double click on the cd drive.
Choose "perform additional tasks"
Then "velue add"
then "Msft"
then "ntbackup"
then double click the ntbackup installer
and you're off to the races.
Its easy to use, run it as abover from 'system tools', theres a wizard, select 'backup everything on this computer including settings and so forth' or whatever its called, choose a target location, and when its done with that it'll ask you to stick in a blank floppy.
The floppy is bootable and has the tools to partition and format a hard drive, do other odds and ends, and restore that backup set.
What i've been doing is making one of these every now and then to a second hard drive, and I alternate with using the XP transfer files and settings wizard to make a user specific backup for both me and for wendy. That way I can restore the whole mess or just one of our 'identities'.
The transfer files and settings wizard is pretty quick.
I believe this backup tool was a popular 3rd party tool some years ago that microsoft bought out and has been updating since. I think its also available by default on windows 2000 and may have been an 'extra' on the windows 98 or ME disks. This guy has it as a download from his web site, you might find it also elsewhere
http://home.comcast.net/~cerelli/ntbackup.msi
I should relate that the only PC hard drive failure I've had in some time has been the second disk I was putting the backup files on. Kinda ironic.
But its saved my bacon a few times when I accidentally deleted some files or wiped out some configuration settings.
In this same vein, I've had a boatload of hard drive experience between multiple pc's and tivo's that run the drives hard 24x7, in case someone is looking for a new or second hard drive and has no idea what brand to buy. Bearing in mind this is like religion and everything I say is good, someone has had a bad experience with, and everything I say is bad, someone will feel is the best made. (shrug)
I've had five Seagate drives. Quiet, cool, quick and not one has busted yet. Three of those are in tivo's that have been running 24x7 and thrashing the drives continuously as the tivo is always recording and playing back in real time. Highly recommended.
I've had a half dozen Maxtor drives. Usually can be had for low cost. Pretty reliable, I havent had one break yet including a pair of 160GB drives that have been chugging away in a tivo. But every single one of them I've had starts whining after a year or so. I hate that.
I've had three western digital hard drives. All three croaked in less than a year. The first 'replacement' I got from WD wasnt entirely right from the get-go and died a few months later. At least they all gave me "SMART" warnings before they expired and let me pull their data.
Samsung has been highly heralded lately for quiet and coolness comparable to Seagate. I had one, it ran for two years beautifully in a small home file server and then promptly expired without warning, taking a lot of pretty valuable data with it.
I've had a number of IBM/Hitachi drives, largely in laptops, occasionally in desktops. Not recommended. IBM had a big problem with a whole class of their drives a few years ago and their response was to not leave them running all the time, including disks they sold as server products. That all by itself leaves me cold.
So if I were buying a hard drive, I'd get a seagate. If I could get a GREAT deal on a maxtor and the place I was putting it in didnt require quiet (like a noisy room), I'd be ok with that too.
