A few days ago I began hearing the death rattle clicking sound of a dying disk drive. Sure enough, the event log verified several retry attempts on the drive. As a veteran of the operating system wars, I've always maintained that is was easier to reinstall the OS and all applications from scratch (following a disk format), rather than trying to recover from a disaster. I maintain all data backups, and I've done this many times in the past.
But to prove that this old dog can learn something new, I decided to attempt a recovery using Symantec's Norton Ghost. I borrowed a friend's external USB drive to aid in the transfer and purchased a replacement for the ailing disk. I can honestly say I've never seen a commercial package that is less intuitive to use, and more poorly documented than Norton Ghost. While the USB drive worked fine with the OS, it was not recognized by the Ghost loader. Neither did attempts to Ghost using the local network ever yield success. But eventually I discovered I could simply add the new disk to the existing workstation as a secondary drive and Ghost to it directly. This may be obvious to others; but, it took me several hours of investigating alternatives before figuring it out. From past experiences with tools of this type, I thought I first needed to create an "image" file of some sort on some other media.
The bottom line is I now have a new (faster) hard disk on my development workstation, and it seems to be working fine. By Ghosting, I probably saved myself a full day of reloading software. Unfortunately, I took me almost a full day to learn how to Ghost. But I'll be ready the next time.