almost done

Well, the sun is setting, and the backup of my main desktop machine is done, with no errors. I’m creating a disaster recovery ISO through Retrospect right now. Basically, Retrospect has a process that reads your Windows install CD and creates a new CD image that re-installs Windows and restores your backup. I’ve had to use this once before (on my machine at work, after a hard drive crash) and it works pretty well.

The one weird thing that gave me trouble today is that Retrospect was having trouble reading my Windows CD. After going through a number of things to figure out why that might be, I wound up just copying the CD to my hard drive first, then letting Retrospect read from the hard drive. My best guess as to why Retrospect can’t read from the CD drive would be that it’s loading some special drivers to make backups go faster, and that’s screwing up the regular CD drivers.

I’ve also finished setting up the old Gateway laptop. I reinstalled Windows XP, loaded all the Gateway drivers and software, upgraded to SP2, installed 73 patches, then went back and installed IE 7 and WMP 11. It’s in a pretty good state right now, though I don’t have any anti-virus software on there. There’s a trial version of Norton Anti-Virus 2003 on one of the Gateway CDs, but I don’t think I want to install that. Maybe I’ll install the 90-day trial version of OneCare, or maybe the free Avast or AVG. Or maybe I’ll let the next guy worry about that.

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