Schonhose

There comes a time you absolutely have to do a complete reinstall of your system. Obvious, back in the day with Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME this time would be every other month. However, this hasn’t been the case with Windows XP.

Let me explain my personal situation, about two years ago I reinstalled my system from scratch, building it up to a state I was more than comfortable with. It has been running rock solid ever since (much to my surprise I might add).

Yesterday I decided to do it all again. Why you might ask would I go to the trouble of rebuilding my system from scratch again? Well, mainly because I had tested a lot of software, and some install routines where below par. Not all traces where removed while uninstalling the packages. This leaves a system with extra baggage and I felt after two years the time had come to start fresh.

Luckily I have learned from earlier experiences: no matter how hard you try, you’ll always forget to copy some important stuff. It might be some documents not in the ‘My Documents’ folder, it might be some settings from a particular program, but you always will forget something.

So I decided to make a image. What I needed was a small program, simple to use and most important: it should be able to let me browse the image and copy the files I needed. I’ve found such a program in IRestorer. It is small and does what it promises: making a diskimage on another drive. And best of it all, it is free.

Sure enough I found a couple of things I missed after install:

• Mail from Thunderbird (although I thought I had it covered)
• MySQL databases from my local XAMPP install (for development)
• Feedreader settings

I managed to fix it all by using the IRestorer software which mounts the image as a drive so you can copy stuff from it. I’ll bet it will save me some more in the next few days.