Preparing for a system recovery and reconfiguration is such a pain… I’m in the process of collecting utilities that will hopefully make future recovery operations go much more smoothly.
By the way, this is the program that destroyed my Windows set-up. It’s called FilMerit and it’s supposed to detect and fix codec problems in Windows.
Lots of people have used it without problems, and FilMerit does set a restore point in case things go wrong. But in my case, I couldn’t even get into System Restore to roll back the system. Upon reboot, the system restore point that FilMerit supposedly created was nowhere to be found.
At least a full system re-installation will solve any codec problems I had. 
The Tools
I’ll be using an array of freeware utilities to re-configure the system:
For a stand-alone, self-booting Windows environment, I’ll be going with an old standby, BartPE. I looked into WinBuilder, which is supposed to be a more capable and very flexible portable environment creator with a plug-in structure.
But my attempts to create a LiveCD boot disk failed, and the lack of any good novice resources on the official forums was a turn-off. I’ll go with what I know works, and BartPE has worked for me in the past.
I’ll be using GParted to re-arrange the partitions on the existing drive, merging and reducing the number of logical drives from 6 to just 3.
CloneZilla will be used to make a drive image of the pristine Windows set-up, and another drive image after applications have been re-installed. Should anything go horribly wrong, I should be able to restore everything very quickly and easily.
New Storage
I haven’t decided yet on which hard drive I want to buy. The Samsung SpinPoint F1has gotten very favourable reviews and its performance is very good. Reviews: Sharky Extreme, Tom’s Hardware, techreport.com
However, I’ve heard that the F1 tends to bog down during heavy simultaneous I/O requests. Whether this is a true deal-breaker for me remains to be determined.
It’s quite possible that I might not go with a terabyte drive at all and get something with a smaller capacity but with better performance when it comes to simultaneous I/O access.
I’ll have to do more research.
Fingers Crossed
Barring any significant problems, I anticipate that it should only take me the better part of a day to get everything re-installed once the new hard drive is in.
So by the end of next week, I should have a fully functioning system once again, except with a better and more efficient drive lay-out, a configuration that’s easier to back-up and restore, and without all the software bloat that tends to accumulates over time.
Tags: bart pe, clonezilla, gparted, repair, system restoration, windows
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