It is official. Scott Hanselman knows everything there is to know about everything. After my laptop failed to boot last night, I spent 3 hours researching, trying to create a bootable CD that can install the mass storage USB device driver I needed to do a more recent back up of my system to my fantabulous Seagate 250GB drive. My most recent backup was 1 week ago, not good enough!

So, then I see Scott online, and wouldn't you know his “handle” says “If it's been written, I've installed it (at least once)”...so I took the bait and sure enough he had great advice.

”Winternals,” he said, “that's what I would do.”

So this great little utility provides you with a bootable CD that launches their own custom OS layer, providing access to the harddrive, network, external devices (USB/Firewire) and some utilities for recovering the underlying OS. Personally, I didn't give a crap about recovering the OS at this point, it has been 6 months, time for a clean slate (usually triggered by some inconvenient event such as this)...but I wanted my data, that is for sure. It is amazing how much work you can get done on the road in 1 week's time, I had plenty to recover, never mind email.

So, I purchased this for $149, downloaded and pressed a CD, and in less than one hour I was able to see the c: and d: folders of my unlucky machine...what a sight! I had that thing backing up to my Seagate before you could say “make me a ham sandwich“ and today I'm ready to wipe the machine.

http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/erdcommander2002.asp?pid=erd

My only comments:

a) if the file explorer encounters an error copying a file from one directory, it moves to the next directory, but skips the remaining files/subfolders in the directory where it encountered the problem. You will KNOW that there is an error, because a dialog will block until you acknowledge the error, so be sure and return to that subfolder to recopy, and check directory size to be sure you got it all.

NOTE: I keep ALL of my files in a single folder “\All My Crap“ so that ultimately I have a single directory that I can move, or back up, at any given time. Forget about \Documents and Settings\ etc...

b) if you want to recopy files to the backup drive, you have to wipe clean existing directories and start fresh, unless you want to sit there and approve “overwrite” for every directory...lame

Still, I'm up and running and happier than I was 12 hours ago. This tool was well worth the $149 bucks ($250 for server systems).

Thanks Scott, you rock!

In my travels, I also encountered this link:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp

It talks about slipstreaming XP SP2 onto the same CD when you install XP2...and if you build machines as often as I do, that can be a real time saver, not to mention you don't need to connect to the network to get that security service pack on there. I'm going to give this a shot as well.

Next action item, get that Seagate configured to do the “click once” backup of my entire machine...so I can more easily back up every night on the road, and at home. I'm sure I should have done this ages ago, but alas there is only so much time in the day to be an admin...