ggabriel,

If your reply was to me, then what I was talking about is your hardware. I guess I didn't explain myself right. Any hardware (processor, memory, hard-drives, ect...) can cause your OS not to boot-up. This has happened to me and some of my friends. One guy I know simply took out all of his memory, video & sound cards, drives, and blew the dust off of them. When he put them back in his computer, and it booted up just fine.

That's what I meant by anything in your computer.

And, to answer your question, I use Acronis 10 Advanced Workstation. I keep a boot-up CD, a image of my C: drive, both in a file on another drive and in Acronis's hidden partition on the C: Drive. I also keep a clone of the C: drive. I only make the clone after I do a fresh install with a programs loaded and running their best.

I always buy 2 drives at the same time one for information the other as a backup for the first. I've lost too much time and money by not doing this (I learned the hard way).

I know this my sound like a little over kill, but I've even lost all of the information on a 2TB server running on a RAID 5. How? If your RAID controller fails (it's built into your server and is what controls your RAID), you can't restore your drives. That's why I now have 2 2TB servers. Losing 2TB's of information once was enough for me. Now I backup, backup & backup some more.


Hope this helps.