A little over a month ago, I noticed that there were these odd rainbow colored streaks showing up on some of my review pictures, and I couldn’t figure out why! Everything was otherwise working perfectly on my T4215, which I had recently updated to Vista Ultimate and had basically configured to perfection.

“Can you see the vertical lines in my pictures?” I must have asked various people this at least twenty times. No one could see them on their monitors, but I was convinced it was the fault of the camera I was using at the time. It was easier to believe there was something wrong with my camera than to think that there was something wrong with my brand new Fujitsu T4215. :glurps_tb:

Of course, it was my T4215, and these pictures illustrate how bad things had become by the time I finally broke down and sent it in for repair…

Since I had my Fuji configured so perfectly, and since Vista has this wonderful new backup and restore center that I had heard so many good things about, I planned on taking full advantage of it.

It took five DVDs to make a 40GB mirror image of my C drive; for good measure I also backed up my Outlook .pst files on another DVD, and then I saved the .pst and Documents folders to my 400GB Seagate external hard drive. I figured there was no harm in covering myself multiple ways. Good thing I did…

For the record, I would have done the full C backup to the Seagate, but it uses FAT32 and the backup required a drive formatted to NFTS. Oh well, I happened to have a new pack of DVD-Rs handy, so I didn’t mind.

I sent my Fujitsu back, and within a week it was returned. Fujitsu replaced my T4215’s mainboard; the parts used were the Thermal Rubber T4210, 4215, and the PCB, System Board w/o CPU.

Because my Fuji was shipped with XP installed, and since I had installed Vista and the Fujitsu Vista drivers on my own, I had used the Fujitsu Recovery & Utility Disk to completely wipe my hard drive and reinstall it to factory specs before sending it in.

Upon receiving the Fuji back, and seeing that the streaks were indeed gone, I was ready to start restoring and getting my tablet back in order. I figured that I might write a quick blurb about the screen streaks and how they had been resolved, end of story.

So the first thing I had to do when I booted the Fuji was finish the XP install that had been started before I sent it back. Once this was done, I installed the Vista disk and chose option #2, the fresh install – not an upgrade. Based on a ZD Net article I had seen which mentioned that you could get a “non-destructive clean install” by installing Vista on top of XP then doing a Disk Cleanup on the C Drive, and then deleting the old XP files, I figured I was doing a good thing.

Au Contraire Mon Frére; the headache had just begun.

The backup did not work at all; I followed the Windows Vista directions to the T, and it would not work. I got phone support from Clinton Fitch, our resident MVP, to no avail. We both searched the web trying to find anyone that had successfully used the backup tool to to a full restore, and he was able to find one documented restore. One.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t replicate the writer’s steps successfully. I wound up having to do a full reinstall, and I lost quite a bit of the items I thought had been successfully backed up. Ah well…

So this leads me to my question: How many of you are actually counting on Vista backup? Has anyone had a successful full Vista restore? If so, how did you do it? I’d love to hear about your experiences.

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