Recently I installed Windows 7 Beta on my netbook, then wanted to test the restore process to get it back to Windows XP. I used the windows home server to backup my netbook originally and to backup the installation of windows 7. This, I thought, would allow me to jump back and forth between XP and W7 at will.
The biggest problem happened though. The windows home server bootable restore wizard doesn’t recognize my netbooks LAN card. Thus making restores impossible.
I was distracted for a short time while I exchanged the netbook for another with a WWAN card. But now I’m back and solved the restore problem.
A long time ago I purchased a copy of Acronis TrueImage Workstation, a backup/restore solution I was using to backup customers hard drives.
I used it to create a bootable disk on one USB thumb drive, and used a second much larger thumb drive to backup my XP image.
Now I can restore my XP drive at will… Yay!!! Thus giving me the comfort level to move forward with additional Windows 7 testing.