>>I just lost my c: drive this morning which was a S.M.A.R.T. Western Digital 1.2 gig. I run Windows NT Workstation and had all my apps on a SCSI drive (d:). I was dreading going back through installing NT Workstation, then my tape software and then hoping the tape would actually have my c: drive. However, I purchased a 6.4 ide Western Digital and set it to master with my old drive as slave. The WD bootable floppy disk prompted me for full automatic install which I did and noticed an option to copy second drive to the first. I did this and was up and running within 15 minutes. THIS IS THE WAY IT WAS ALWAYS SUPPOSED TO BE!!!!
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>>Sorry, just thought I'd put in a plug for S.M.A.R.T. and WD technologies. Sure saved lots of time.
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>If the old (1.2G) drive was visible to your BIOS and you could copy the data off it, it probably wasn't really dead. You might want to reformat it and try to use it again (as another spare). I'd also suggest scanning ALL your drives for virii...
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I've gotten in the habit of making image backups of my drives on a regular basis; there are a number of solutions (Ghost, ImageCast, TapeDisk, Universal Drive Copy) that will make sector by sector image backups either to a file, or to tape devices (at least SCSI devices that are accessible with ASPI drivers), will back up any and all operating systems, and can restore them to the same or new media from a DOS-based boot floppy. If you're using SCSI tape backup (I use DAT) UDC at under $100 from CSC (www.corpsys.com) is the least-cost solution; it also supports other media, and does a decent job of copying CDs if you have a CD-R or CD-R/W. TapeDisk turns you SCSI tape drive into a DASD, addressible as another disk drive, and offers a ton of functionaility. Ghost is widely available, and does a great job (we use it to create standard system setups to install on turnkey systems for Win95/98; while it images NT partitions, it doesn't handle fixing SIDs, so using it to clone NT systems for network environments is a problem, requiring some extra work); ImageCast does much the same thing, but offers push-based multicasting of systems for large-scale production, and has a SID handler, but it's expensive. Both Ghost and ImageCast require separate drivers to use tape devices for imaging.

A number of backup programs are offering single-floppy restore options at this time; Win98's backup handles Win98 systems nicely, and both BackupExec (now a Seagate product, sold as Seagate Backup) and CA-ArcServe (formerly Cheyenne, now owned by CA) both offer the single-floppy recovery utility now.