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.
