O.k., I'll admit, the first time that I used windows Vista backup, I was very underwhelmed, but it's grown on me, and now I'm a huge fan. On Monday, I received a new hard drive from Dell. It's bigger and doesn't make strange clicking and stalling noises like the old drive did. :) I was pretty certain that the old drive was going to go.
To swap out the drives, I plugged in a USB drive with sufficient capacity and did a windows backup complete pc backup. Once that was finished, I plopped in the new drive and my Vista installation DVD. After the restart, I selected the Restore Vista options, found my complete backup and started the restore. Once it was done, I rebooted and was up and running again. That was it! It just worked! I spent less than 10 minutes (not counting actual backup time) on completely replacing the drive. I've NEVER had a backup and restore go that smoothly. In the past, I've always had to install the OS before I could get to the backup, and then it'd be a hassle because of drivers and such, and the final restore wouldn't quite be the same. This restored things EXACTLY the same.
I did have to reauthorize Diskeeper, but that was the only thing that I had to touch.
Knowing that I can mount the complete backup using virtual PC is also nice.
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