Making a system image
I have done this twice before, but did not write about it. Windows Backup provides an option to make a system image of the C: drive, and optionally of other drives. This system image is the simplest and safest way I have found to restore my system after a catastrophic drive crash. I have done it once before, and it worked well. My regular backups do preserve the data, but rebuilding from scratch is a big project even if the source material is available.
To do this, you bring up the Backup program and click on the left side..."Create a System Image." I put these images on drive U: and right now, there is an image I created 3/21/2012. There should be room for another snapshot, but there is a warning that old system images might be overwritten. That is ok, because what is there now is pretty old, but I wonder why it does that when these is room left. Maybe it needs contiguous space.
Creating a new disk from the image can be done using a bootable system recovery disk, which I have in my physical DVD files.
Update 12/31/2012:
I got some errors reported on drive C: from the HP hardware diagnostics. Just in case this is a real problem, I decided to make a new disk image. The backup failed with this message:
The operation failed due to a device error encountered with either the source or the destination. If the source or destination volume is on a disk, run CHKDSK /R on teh source or destination volume, and then retry the operation. (0x8078012D) Additional Information: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error. (0x8007045D)
A web search for the I/O device error code yielded an suggestion by a microsoft person to turn off "shadow copies" on the drives. The forum is here. A search for 0x8078012D brings me to this forum, which also has some interesting suggestions.
Now running CHKDSK /R on drive U: Drive U: checks out fine. Now checking out drive C: which needs to be done during boot.
