Here's my recipe for keeping a system running 24/7. A little History: I'm always trying new stuff with my PC. Installing and uninstalling stuff. As a result I often get Blue Screens and sometimes Kill my OS install altogether. This trick has made all the difference come CRUNCH time when your system craps out on you. I use mainly NT 4.0 and Win98SE but it will work with any OS in the Windows PC family. The Recipe: It's simple If you have more than 1 HDD on your system. The second one should preferably be large. 1. Buy a Copy of DriveCopy from PowerQuest or Ghost from Norton or whatever. 2. Get yor system just like you want it. 3. Copy the OS partition over to your large HDD and mark it as hidden. (You can also minimize the size of the partition with Partition Magic from PowerQuest it'll only take up about 1/2 Gig even if you have your most needed utility type programs like CD-R software and all your drivers and OS utilities) When your system crashes. 1. you fire up DriveImage from the rescue floppy they have you make or make one on another machine 2. set your crapped out OS partition as inactive and your good partition as active 2b. alternatively copy the good OS partition from your large HDD to the HDD your OS was setting on. 3. in your system BIOS (CMOS) tell your system to boot to HDD-01 (the large HDD) 4. Boot up and copy any files from the corrupted HDD to your Large HDD. 5 Reboot to your DriveImage diskette and set the old OS partition as Inactive. 6. Win98 and NT don't like systems with two active partitions visible.

That is one way. An easier way would be to get Drive Image Pro, get you system the way you want it, and then make an image of your hard drive. Drive Image Pro will even compress the image, and also span it across cdr's if you need to. The trick is to do it after a fresh install of Windows and you have all of your graphics programs loaded. I have gone and reformated my hard drive and installed from a back up image and been up and running in under an hour before.

Great, just finished with new install of Win98 SE after installing my brand new Poser Pro Pack. Nice to hear - have ghost, will try it now. thanks

Mochen Let me know how Ghost goes. Thanks LastExplorer I may have to upgrade. Mine was a freebie that came with my HiVal CD-RW.