Install Service Packs

You disconnected your PC from the network, right? This is just an optional precaution for Vista, as its firewall is on by default. But, it doesn’t hurt to be extra careful, so until you have the latest Service Pack installed, don’t connect your rig to the net. Windows XP is far more vulnerable because non–Service Pack builds don’t have the firewall on and connecting the machine directly to the Internet will infect a new install almost instantly. We know of people who got caught in an infinite loop of getting infected and not knowing how it happened since each instance was a “clean” install from a factory Windows XP disc. Even if you’re on the other side of a router, there’s no guarantee that your PC won’t be infected by a machine inside the network, so disconnect that XP box.

Once the machine is running, power down and plug your old hard drive back in and boot into the BIOS. Make sure your BIOS is set to boot from your new drive, not your old drive. Now boot into the OS. Find the old drive (it will have a letter other than C:) and install the Service Pack you downloaded. For Windows Vista, Service Pack 1 is the current version. For Windows XP, it’s Service Pack 3.

Move In

The first driver you install should be the chipset driver. Next, reboot and install the audio drivers, NIC, SATA, and any other devices your board has. Some of the drivers will require a reboot and should prompt you if they do. Once those are done, move on to your other devices, such as the graphics card, add-in soundcard, and TV tuner. Now connect the machine to the Internet and run Windows Update. You might also need to activate Windows. If Microsoft’s server doesn’t accept the activation, be prepared to do a phone activation. Now, install the applications you gathered up earlier and do any OS tweaks, such as setting the standby mode, installing your favorite screensaver, changing the desktop background, and arranging the icons just so.

Migrate Your Data

Now it’s time to move all your data over to the new drive. Open My Computer, find your old drive and start copying your files over. In Windows Vista, the bulk of your user files are located in C:\Users\your user name. Since your new drive is so deliciously huge, you can copy the contents of the directory over to your desktop. This will let you go through the folders and conduct a spring cleaning to weed out, say, that 10GB of blurry photos. One thing you can instantly do is move your iTunes directory over, after first installing iTunes on the new hard drive.

Windows XP users can find their iTunes folder on the old drive by looking in C: \Documents and Settings\your user name\My Documents\My Music\iTunes; Vista users can look in \Users\your user name\Music\iTunes\. Copy the contents from there to the same place on the new drive.

For Steam games, download the latest version of Steam and install it. In Vista x64, copy over the Steam Apps directory from \Program Files (x86)\Steam\ to the same directory on your clean drive. Relaunch Steam and your games will be ready to play. Windows XP and 32-bit Vista users will find the files in \Program Files\Steam\.

Consider Your Image

Once you have your OS installed, patched, and tweaked just the way you like it, you should make an image of it. A disk image of your pristine OS allows you to instantly have a custom reinstall up and running should you experience a catastrophic malware attack or hard disk failure. We like Acronis True Image Home 2009 ($50, www.acronis.com).

If you haven’t used disk imaging software in a while, you’ll notice that it’s changed quite a bit. Disk imaging used to be run only on occasion to create a static image that when used would take your machine back to the very day the image was built. While it would save you the time of dealing with an OS reinstall from scratch, you would have essentially lost months of changes.

You can set Acronis True Image Home 2009 to make a monthly image of your machine so a restore won’t take you back to day one. You can also tell the program to back up your application data and documents on a daily basis.

Today’s disk imaging applications not only build an initial static image, but also update the image, so you could, say, restore the PC to the state it was two weeks before the drive went kaput. The apps also now support file backups, so you have two layers of safety: first, a full image that is updated on a monthly or biweekly basis. File backups can be done weekly or daily depending on your level of paranoia.

Set up Your Safety Net

You’re no longer at risk of simply losing your old schoolwork when your hard drive craps out. Today, a hard drive failure will wipe out gigabytes of invaluable memories and entertainment. While an external RAID 5 NAS backup drive would provide peace of mind, that’s a silly-expensive solution and rather slow. And even pairing a backup drive with your primary drive in RAID 1 isn’t the best solution. We like to use a single backup drive equal or near-equal in size to our primary drive along with a disk imaging app—in this case, Acronis True Image.

We set the disk imaging app to make a weekly image backup of our primary drive and file backups every other day. We like this configuration because it gives us some fallback that a RAID 1 array doesn’t. If you erase something on RAID 1 and realize you need it the next week, it’s gone. Or if a virus runs amok on your primary drive, it does so simultaneously on its RAID 1 counterpart. With a disk image and regular backups, you can choose from multiple points in time to recover.

So power down your machine, disconnect your old drive, and put it in a safe place. Install the second new drive, plug it into the port the old drive was in, and power up. Right-click My Computer, click Manage, select Storage, and Windows should ask you to initialize the new disk. Create a partition on the drive and format it. Again, unless you have a need for separate partitions, one single contiguous partition mitigates the drive letter confusion.

Schedule Your Backups 

Install True Image Home 2009. (Note: Although Acronis True Image Home 2009 works with RAID, it doesn’t work with all RAID configurations. Acronis’s True Image Echo Workstation is a better choice for RAID imaging, albeit more expensive.) Launch the program, click Back Up, and select My Computer. Select the C: drive for backup. Click Next and select your target for the archive. Choose the second drive, create a new folder by clicking Create New Folder, name the file, and click OK. In the Scheduling pane, select a backup schedule that works for you—one that doesn’t run during the times you use your PC. Enter a user name and password so Acronis can run the backup unattended. Under Backup  Method, select Incremental. Hit Next for the next four tabs and your hard drive will be backed up on the specified schedule.

You should also create a separate image that you keep handy if you do need to roll your machine back to day one status. To do this, go to the opening menu of True Image, select Backup and Restore and My Computer, select your C: drive, and click Next. Select Target archive and put the image in a directory on your second drive. Name the file Day1.tib. Select Schedule and make sure it is set to Do Not Schedule. The window should say “Run this task manually.” Click Summary and then Proceed.

You should also now set True Image to make automatic backups of your data. After you select Backup and Restore, select the My Data option. This will let you select the type of data you want to back up and the frequency of the backups. You can run it daily or every other day since the process should be much faster once you’ve made the initial backup.

And before you finish with Acronis, you should create a boot disk, which, in the event that your drive or OS goes kaput, will allow you to boot the machine in order to access the restore image from your backup drive. Do this by clicking Start > Programs > Acronis True Image Home > Bootable Rescue Media Builder. Select Acronis True Image Home, click Next, and Next again, and select CD-RW. Pop a blank disc in the optical drive and your boot disc will be created.

Congrats. You’re done and fully prepared for just about any type of catastrophe.

Restoration Software

Putting your defensive strategy to work

Restoring your image is as easy as popping in the boot CD, selecting the image you want to restore, and waiting for your system to come back to life.

So the worst case scenario happens: Your hard drive dies or you try a Windows “performance” trick and accidently nuke everything on your drive. Not a problem. Grab the True Image Home 2009 rescue disc that you made and drop it into the optical drive. Boot the machine off of the disc. Select Acronis True Home 2009 and click Manage and Restore. Locate the image that you want to restore from your secondary hard drive. If you want the last automated image True Image Home made, select that. If you decide you want to go back to your day one image, point it at that directory.

Make sure that you select the correct disk that you want to restore your image to.

Select Restore Whole Disks and Partitions and then select the disk you want to restore from the backup image. Since you had only one partition on your original drive, you should be presented with only the C: drive and the MBR and Track 0. Select both. Now select the destination drive where you want the partition to go. If the target drive still has a partition on it (whether infected or corrupted) you’ll get a warning message saying so. Just click OK. Click Next until you get to the Summary screen and click Proceed. True Image will proceed with the image restoration and you should be able to boot directly into the OS as it was last backed up.