Last Friday my Windows Media Center 2005 PC started refusing to display live tv, or record any tv. The error message was that the data rate from the cable box was too low. Well, after many reboots, shutting the system down to let it cool off, unplugging the cable box, etc, I decided that perhaps something had gone wrong with the system, so I decided to restore it from a Ghost backup I made a few days before.
Initially I began by simply booting off of the Ghost 9.0 CD, and after about 5 minutes, the system came up to a license agreement text box. I tried clicking Accept (yeah, like I had a choice!), but neither the mouse or the keyboard worked. Either this was just a one time freak thing, or it didn’t like my wireless USB only keyboard and mouse. I plugged in a regular keyboard and rebooted hoping that it would bring success.
It did! This time, once I reached the license screen, my mouse and keyboard responded fine and I quickly signed away all my rights.
At this point, I was faced with making some decisions about restoring the data. The good news is that I had no problem figuring out what to do, and the system had no problem seeing my USB hard drive that contained the backup. I set it to completely replace the hard drive with the backup image, and to verify the backup image before beginning (I would hate to lose all my music and pictures if I blew it!).
Once I was ready, I turned the process loose. It took a couple of hours to restore 100 or so gig, but it worked flawlessly. I am very happy with Ghost, and I’m glad I use it to backup my Media Center PC, as well as my home system.
The only negative with Ghost is that recent versions require activation and only allow installation on one system. I understand that they want to maximize revenue (and in my case it worked), but it leaves a bad taste in ones mouth to constantly have to activate software (thanks Microsoft!). I wonder how much hassle it would be to move it to another system. They’d probably tell me to buy another license. A home license like Apple does with OS X would be a nice addition…
The bad news is that the tv problem isn’t fixed. I just received my new tuner card, which I’ll try out tonight. Keep your fingers crossed! If it doesn’t work, well, tv just isn’t a huge part of my life, so I won’t be too upset 🙂