>No idea. You've got more patience or Merlot than me. I would have formatted
>that sucker hours ago.

Imagine that you work at a software company, in a position that demands that you install fresh bits on, at the very least, a semi-weekly basis. Imagine that sometimes a bad build will render your machine to the status of "boat anchor" once in a while. I don't know how any serious developer or tester gets by without disk imaging software. Make a copy of the bits on a stable drive, and then when you trash it, just take that copy of bits and put them back on the drive. In essence, it's just like it was last time it was stable.

Why image instead of format and reinstall? Because once I've got a a stable system, with Windows 2000, Office, and a copy of VS6, I image it and if I trash the system, I can be back to work in 5-10 minutes. Compare this to formatting the drive, reinstalling the OS, reinstalling VS, and reinstalling any office apps you might use. You can easily blow half a day trying to get it running again. I don't pay for the stuff, but I'll bet imaging software has to be less than US$100, much less than a half day's work.

I recommend imaging just the OS and apps, and not data. You can easily backup data through various painless means. What software do I recommend? I don't, I just use what they give us at work. We're currently using PQDI (sorry, I have no clue where it comes from). Is it better or worse than anything else? I don't know, but I do know that it serves my needs very well.

Now, if I had listened to my own advice, I wouldn't be staring at a box that no longer boots, thanks to a bad install of one of the latest beta OSs. :-)