To me formatting the hard disk is like cleansing your system of all those nasty DLL's. It makes it easier to test installations and even the program you are working on. Especially with VB/ADO and all of the DLL's that accompany that mess. I like to format just to keep my development hard disk clean. I normally back up important files/programs and then reinstall just WinXP and Visual Studio. I'm thinking about getting another hard-disk or a server to just hold all of the "junk" I download and have backed up on CD.
How often do you guys format your development and test systems? On your test machine(s), do you format the hard disk before every installation test or do you simply do a restore of a clean system off of a back up. If you do a restore what software/hardware do you use?
A complete format and install every six months or so is the rule here at Mitch & Murray. In addition, we have test systems that have a clean disk, and then we use Ghost to blast over a fresh/clean OS install which we then use for any testing / tool eval / install and deployment tests. This way we can have a fresh virgin install of any Win32 flavor and most Linux flavors up and running in the time it takes to Ghost the image over - 5 minutes or so.
The Ghost technique we have found to be _vastly_ easier & better than doing it all with VMWare. It takes a few hours to install & Ghost the images over to a server, but after that investment of time you are in business forever.
The Ghost utility is also great for doing a complete stand-alone backup of any system to a server drive. We do our laptops that way weekly - takes about an hour for 20GB, runs totally unattended after it first fires up.
I make two Ghost images. One directly after I've installed the OS and made all those little customizations to the desktop, start menu, and so on that take a load of time but make up for it in comfort, and a second one a few days later after I have installed all the software I'm going to be using. I rarely bother with another one, as I reckon that it would take up too much space and stuff I install after the first time is rarely stuff I'm 100% certain to want to reinstall again.
Obviously I have all data on the D drive (and the Windows install disk on another FAT32 partition).
If you're looking at a testing machine, then you want to install just the OS and the program you're running. Using Ghost appears the best way, as it will install an OS in less than ten minutes.
I would consider running the test again with some common software (Office, WinZip, Photoshop, Norton and others) installed, so that you can tell if there are any incompatibilities.
But as for stability I have found that W2000 has done away with much of the need for periodic reinstalls that used to be de riguer with Win98.
Imaging is a fabulous for re-installing. However imaging is a separate issue from testing. Vmware makes more sense for testing software.
In general, imaging a machine is always with Ghost (our sysadmin maintains a good set of standard images we pull from, depending on our machine type and role), but almost all our test environments are handled via VMWare by me. Occasionally, we have had some hardware-specific testing requriements arise where I either chose to or I had to use physical boxes (e.g. needed to test a game's min sys requirements for the mac and pc). For new projects or at other appropriate times, I start off with fresh copies of our reference VMWare guest OSs, and will make special 'dirty' copies that have sundry other crap on them as needed for the environment (e.g. had to install visual studio once, because of its debugger, to recreate a javascript bug on a particular build of IE 5.0 a client was seeing--weird).
About saving data before formatting a hard drive:
Let's suppose I have a hard disk of 40 GB and I want to backup some files.
Can I just split the Hard Disk into 2 partitions and use the second partition for storing my files there? Is there any risk to lose the files on the second partition after I format the first partition where Windows was installed? Any idea?
Interesting Example:
Because my hard drive is becoming a mess, I decided to reformat it and reinstall Windows XP. No luck. I get the message that "format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Format may run if this volume is dismounted first. All opened handles to this volume would then be invalid. Would you like to force a dismount on this volume (Y/N). I said Y. The the message came up. Cannot lock the drive. The volume is still in use.
