A few weeks ago our main home system went down.  Bit of a drama since this is our main US <-> UK household hub.  First thought was Spinrite.  The problem was manifesting as boot halting at crcdrive.sys and I figured this should be easy.  Tried both a level 2 and level 4 pass to no avail (to Steve’s credit he does have a 30 day refund policy which he honored).  Next stop was Vista’s boot repair.  Still no joy.  Ouch.

Luckily we have a HP MediaSmart Home Server which backs everything up nightly.  We’ve been backing up to it for a couple of years but have not had to call upon it’s restore services before.

It turned out to be as simple as picking up a new drive at Fry’s, booting up from the restore CD and waiting a couple of hours.  Then simple reboot and it was as if nothing had changed.  Even better was the fact that the new drive was double the capacity.. even though it was an image-based backup it just worked.

So now we have a working machine, no lost data and a bigger drive.

Result.

But a stark reminder of the old adage that if you only have 1 copy of your data, your data doesn’t exist.