Hardware safety net

Are your support people still spending countless hours rebuilding damaged OSes and applications on corporate PCs? Maybe you should try a different approach. In January, Voom Technologies, a startup company based in Lakeland, Minn., released a PCI card boldly named ISIR (Instant Save Instant Restore). The card, which works with ATA disk drives, promises to quickly revive a computer impaired by a virus, damaging update, corrupted configuration file, or other software illness.

The remedy requires reverting the content of the boot volume to a saved copy stored in a hidden area of the disk drive. This description may prompt a feeling of déjà vu because the Voom solution is very similar to the CoreRestore card we reviewed in October (see “Reboot, restore, resume,” Oct. 10, page 24).

The Voom ISIR is a half-size card that installs in a desktop PC’s or entry level server’s spare PCI (2.2) slot and connects to the ATA disk drive. Using standard ATA connectors, you link one of the card’s two ATA ports to the disk controller and the other to your disk drive. (Voom ships the ISIR card with a spare cable.) Interestingly, the card uses only the electrical connection of the PCI slot. No data travels to the PCI bus.

Prepping for disaster

Installing the card is time-consuming but easy enough if you follow the clear installation guide. We opened our computers’ case, replaced the existing drive with an empty spare, and set the jumpers on the drive to master mode.

Our next step was to power on our PC. The ISIR card has an onboard BIOS that, immediately after the usual POST (Power On Self Test) messages, prompts you to set up the Voom ISIR.

The setup prepares the disk for ISIR protection, essentially splitting the available space into two equally sized areas, one for normal use by the OS and applications, and one, which remains hidden, that is used by ISIR to mirror the area in use. Keep in mind that using ISIR will cost you 50 percent of your disk space, a price you may not want to pay for the benefit of doing an “instant restore” when your PC goes south. By contrast, the CoreRestore solution allows you to determine the amount of disk space to set aside for the persistent mirror.

Setting up our 40GB drive took less than one minute, after which we turned the computer off, then on again. This time the boot-time prompt had changed, offering the choice to enter the ISIR menu or to continue booting.

We chose Continue Booting and began installing Microsoft Windows Me on the ISIR protected drive. After getting Me to work to our satisfaction, we rebooted our PC and selected Backup from the ISIR menu to create the hidden mirror of our Me environment. We did not notice any slow down after installing ISIR. The PC behaved normally, and the only differences were reduced disk space and the additional message at boot time.

Sabotaging the system

Next we had to simulate one of the hundreds of software threats that can make a PC unusable and test ISIR’s restore feature. Using Regedit.exe, Windows’ registry editing tool, we required a mere instant to kill our PC. We pointed at the Local-Machine key and deleted the hardware and software entries. This was perhaps redundant, but it worked: Our mouse and keyboard were no longer functional, forcing us to push the Hard-Reset button to restart. Trying to reboot was a no go; our PC was definitely dead. But after powering off and on, and choosing Restore from the ISIR menu, we immediately saw Windows Me and our PC come back to life.

Reinstalling the OS and applications from scratch, as we did during initial setup, should be the last resort. A quicker and safer alternative is to restore an image of your existing volume after ISIR setup, and then perform the ISIR backup to create a saved copy.

If you don’t have a saved image, ISIR offers a utility to copy your existing volume or volumes to a new protected drive. To test this feature, we set up ISIR on a new drive, then powered off our PC and installed our existing disk, jumpered as a slave containing a working OS and a set of applications, to the second ATA controller on our PC. Next we booted from the Voom diskette containing the imaging utility and saw a list of the slave disk’s volumes. You can copy multiple volumes in the same session, but we chose only the one containing Windows Me.

Using the ISIR imaging software to copy a 14GB volume took about three hours. We then removed the slave drive, restarted our PC, and successfully performed an ISIR backup. We had saved a few hours by not having to reinstall all the software.

ISIR worked equally well backing up and restoring a version of Linux Mandrake 8.1 that we had killed by deleting the bin and sbin directories, and it rescued us from other murderous attempts, such as booting from a diskette and deleting disk partitions with Fdisk. In every instance, choosing Restore at boot time brought the PC and its applications back to life.

ISIR vs. CoreRestore

After testing CoreRestore and ISIR, it’s difficult to cast our preference for either one. Both products succeed in allowing you to swiftly and easily restore a PC to a pristine state.

However, CoreRestore setup is more flexible, allowing you to define the size of the user’s sandbox and thus the space to devote to the restore area, while ISIR will command half of the drive for that purpose. If you use large drives, ISIR can cost you tens of gigabytes of wasted space.

CoreRestore scores another point with the possibility — not offered by ISIR — to set the BIOS to forget changes at each reboot, which ensures that a PC will always start with the same reliable configuration.

On the other hand, Voom provides more software to simplify installation and maintenance, including the imaging utility to transfer the content of your boot volume to a new drive, an update utility to load new BIOS versions in the card, and a mechanism to hide the settings from the user.

We liked both solutions and have no reservations recommending them. Consider their differences and make your choice. In this case, you can only go wrong by not choosing one.