Here is the second part of complete PC backup/restore post. In this part I will cover the restore process. The first part is here.

Now, it is time to upgrade your hardware, and put in that new hard disk. After you have done that, put your Windows Vista boot DVD in your DVD drive and start up the PC. Make sure that your PC’s BIOS is set to boot from your DVD drive. Below are 9 screen shots showing each step in the process.

1. This is the first boot screen.

2. Select your language

3. Select the repair option.

4. Click on the Windows Complete PC Restore option.

5. Scanning for restore images.

6. Restore image found. Click Next.

7. Click Finish.

8. Put a checkmark to confirm that your C:\ will be formatted.

9. Restore in progress.

After the restore is finished, your PC will reboot. After that you have a fully restored PC.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• You can’t restore a 64bit image to a x86 booted system. (Or vice versa.)

If you try, you will get a dialog similar to this:

• Windows Vista may be in a de-activated state after restore, so you may have to activate your license again after the restore.

Well, there you are. You have just realized that your existing local system hard disk is rapidly becoming more and more full. So now you have purchased a brand new 500GB hard disk to be replacing the existing 120GB system disk that you currently have installed as C:\. But going through the steps of formatting a fresh new disk and installing all those programs that you need is somewhat intimidating because you now it will set you back at least a couple of hours of expensive time that you could use to developing new cool things. So what do you do? Well, one option would be to purchase one of those image ghosting tools, like Norton Ghost, or other similar products. But if you are running Windows Vista, there are an alternative.  Which, in my eyes, are far more attractive. You see, Vista has a built in backup utility that can make a complete PC backup of your system with just a few clicks. By backing up your entire system disk to a .vhd file (image file) you can later import this file in the install process. Here are the steps:

1. Backup your entire C:\ to an external USB disk. (Or internal hard disk.)

2. Shutdown your PC, and replace your current C:\ with that brand new disk.

3. Put in your Windows Vista DVD and boot from it and start a new setup.

4. Select the .vhd file you created in step 1.

Let me walk through the steps, in this first part I will describe steps 1 and 2. Steps 3 and 4 will be described in the second part.

The backup utility can be found in All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Backup status and Configuration. Select the Complete PC Backup option in the left pane.

1.Click on Create a backup now.	2. Select the desired location of the backup file end click Next.	3. Select the C:\ System disk and click Next.
4. Click on Start backup to start the backup.	5. Back in progress.	6. Click Close when the backup has finished.

This completes the full PC backup process. Continue to part 2 to perform the restore process.

Today Microsoft released the December preview of Expression Blend 2. Go and get it from here.

I haven’t played around with is much yet, but one thing that is new is it requires the .NET Framework v3.5. It is also rather clear that Visual Studio 2008 is the perfect mate, since projects in Blend 2 can’t be opened in Visual Studio 2005.

After setting up an aspx page that accepts IPN postings from PayPal on my domain, I got this error when trying to post IPN data:

The remote server returned an error: (999) No Hacking

Well, I didn’t have this problem with my previous hosting company, nor when trying on my local IIS web site. So I contacted Webhost4Life, on their live chat support. That didn’t help much. But I finally found the solution.

It turns out that Webhost4Life has a functionality called Security Guard. Turning this off for my sub domain did the trick.

You will find the Security Guard in your Control Panel, Security section.

I have been struggling with this for a couple of hours now. Now matter what options I set in the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Import and Export Wizard, I cannot manage it to correctly transfer my identity columns.

It turns out that this is a bug in SQL Server 2005. There are a couple of proclaimed workarounds like this and this. However that didn’t work for me. I cannot uncheck the “Optimize for Many Tables”, because if I do, I get a lot of other key errors when the package runs.

So I stumbled upon this utility, the Simple SQL Bulk Copy.

It worked great! My tables containing identity columns was transferred correctly.