Rising from the Ashes
Recovering from a hard drive crash tells you a lot about yourself. What do you backup? What do you miss? And what can't you live without as you start to re-create your digital life (or laptop)? I at least had advanced warning from the intermittent BSODs that usually occurred during a critical e-mail writing storm. Rising from the ashes looked something like the following for me:
- Replace hard drive (good first step, right?)
- Install Vista Enterprise SP1 from the network (PXE)
- Plug-in ethernet cable (wireless not working yet...)
- Join myself to the corporate domain
- Reboot
- Add myself to the local administrator's group
- Install ISA Firewall Client from Intranet
- Auto-Enroll for wireless certificate
- Wireless is now working and I can un-tether myself again
- Install Office 2007 (gotta get that e-mail working again)
- Autoconfigure Outlook .... ready to start downloading several GB of e-mail
- Install FolderShare (the absolute easiest way to recover all the files I have backed up on my other machines)... 10 minutes later, I'm functional again
- Now time to install those other applications you can't live without
- Install Office Communicator so people realize I'm back in action
- Install VPN client
- Install Adobe Reader
- Install Adobe Flash
- Install Adobe AIR, so I can ...
- Install Twhirl
- Install Silverlight
- Install PowerShell (passionate hobby ;-)
- Install Zune (not critical, but I much prefer this to WMP)
- Install Windows Live Writer (how else would I write this?)
Done. I'm probably overlooking some things, but so far I haven't missed them.
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About Sean Olson
Sean Olson is the Group Program Manager for the Office Communications Server product at Microsoft. His team is responsible for all engineering aspects of conferencing, instant messaging, presence, and voice within the server product. He has over 10 years experience in the area of real time communications and voice over IP and is an industry expert in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standardized by the IETF. Since joining Microsoft in 2002, he has delivered five releases of the Office Communications Server product line working on everything from protocols, to security, to performance.
