>Hi Bruce,
>
>This doesn't help to fix the old but may save you some greif in the future.
>
>Buy an extra hardrive and put in the machine. Then buy a copy of Norton Ghost http://smallbiz.symantec.com/Products.cfm?Product=ghost&EID=0&CS=X&PID=na, it's a drive cloner. Now install NT and your apps. When you feel you have a stable install, clone your main drive over to the backup. Don't use the BU drive for anything else.
>
>Now you can install something for testing and if it blows up NT, you can simple clone your backup to your master and be back at the last safe install point. If the install works and is stable (say after testing it for a few days) you can clone your now stable master to the BU drive. In essence slowy increment the BU to a stable install. It takes about 20 minutes to do a clone.
>
>I keep a seperate hard drive with a stable install of NT and all of our general apps for just that purpose. Actually I think Norton will let you create a ghost image on a server so you may not even need the extra harddrive.
>
>You may want to have your LAN guys look at Ghost and also IC3 http://www.innovativesoftware.com/imagecast/home.htm for deployment of NT once you get ready.

I've used both, and frankly, for the money, it's hard to beat PowerQuest's DriveCopy Pro, or if you have a system with a SCSI tape drive, Adaptec's ImageCopy and TAPEDISK offer a ton of functionality at a small fraction of the cost. ImageCast is overkill unless you need the multicast capability for spewing to multiple targets at once across the LAN - been there, done that, and went back to DriveCopy Pro. While you're at it, pick up PQ's new PArtition Magic 5.0; very neat on the fly reorganization and full support of all NTFS and FAT types directly, as well as the immensely useless HPFS and Linux formats...