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Norton Zip Rescue: Averting Disaster

If you own a Zip or Jaz drive, you can use Symantec's free Norton Zip Rescue to restore your PC after a Windows wreck.

By John Goddard, PCWorld   

Sometimes, all you need is a quick--if inconvenient--reboot. Other times, you wind up staring into the blue screen of death. That's when you'll want to have Symantec's Norton Zip Rescue disk tucked away in a safe place.

If you've got an Iomega Zip or Jaz drive, you can recover from Windows disasters without the truly annoying task of reinstalling the operating system. However, you must have downloaded this free 7.5MB utility from Iomega's site before your crash. All you need is a blank Zip or Jaz disk and a clean 1.44MB floppy. In fact, if an internal Iomega drive is your A: drive or boot drive, you won't need the floppy.

Setup is painless. It takes about 15 minutes to unzip the program to 11.4MB worth of executable files, then copy the files onto the rescue disks. The floppy disk will hold the files you need to boot your computer and recover its basic systems, while the Zip (or Jaz) disk contains all other files, including ones needed to start Windows, various Norton utilities, and anything else you may need rescued.

You can also set Windows restoration to Safe or Normal Mode. On your desktop, a tiny traffic light next to the clock on Windows' Start bar alerts you when you should update the rescue disks.

Crash-Test PC
After installation, it was time to earn my pay and disable my precious Pentium. I zapped my win.ini and command.com files along with several important-looking DLL files for extra measure. Then, with a wince, I emptied the trash and rebooted.

The screen turned black, my hard drive spun aimlessly, and after a few sad beeps, it died. Numb, I inserted the floppy and Zip rescue disks, and powered up again. The hard drive light blinked, the floppy whirred, and the Zip drive light winked wildly.

A splash screen appeared minutes later, warning that Windows would take "significantly longer" to start up. Within five minutes, the OS crawled into place with wallpaper stating that I was running Windows from my Zip drive. Moments later, up popped Norton's recovery wizard to "troubleshoot what happened and to fix the problem."

Step by step, it compared everything to what it had on disk--CMOS settings, the boot record, partition tables, startup files, and the Windows Registry. It then scanned for viruses and disk damage, and suggested some potential hardware problems. Sure enough, during a search of deleted files, it discovered the axed files and launched Norton's UnErase Wizard to recover them.

Who said good things in life are never free? If you've got a Zip or Jaz drive, Norton Zip Rescue lets you walk away from a nasty Windows crash unscathed.