When good tech goes bad ...

I always wondered how the restore process works. I'd never had a computer that I wanted to deliberately crash just to test the WHS system. It worked. Aside from the hours of waiting for the files to copy over the Ethernet there were no major problems. I helped make sure there was no competition by shutting down everything else on the LAN so the nightly backups would not run and compete for server processor and bandwidth resources.

The PC is back up, the hidden partitions are hidden again and Win XP is working as well as usual.

a SP3 for XP. Also that MS support ends this summer. (Although the SPs should remain on their servers for download.) Also that legacy work is now easier with MS: Free upgrades to make the Offices work both ways for opening and some editing.

merely no new updates, especially as to security. I've never found that to be a problem with Windows because the bad hackers focus on the latest versions. E.g. 98 was safe after XP came out.
With server space now so cheap, MS and others often keep legacy stuff indefinitely.

will not support windows 98 anymore. They are not creating driver files for the controller chips on them. If you wish to continue with windows 98 but replace a motherboard, be sure to check first that the manufacturer has driver files for windows 98. You can load windows 98 on the newest motherboards, but with a lot of functions unavailable. Such functions can be made available only through add in cards for video, LAN, some USB, etc. If windows 98 can't access the controller chips, all the functions included on the motherboard won't work and all that's left is if there's PCI slots available for cards which do have windows 98 driver files. If you want a windows 98 Legacy system for a long time or for future use to show grandkids, etc. I'd get a Gigabyte early model all capacitor motherboard that still did come with windows 98 driver files. The current crop of Gigabyte motherboards with the AMD controller chips will not run windows 98 except in very crippled mode, and that's if you remember all the other moves like limiting the first active partition on a harddrive to 32GB or less. The best legacy system left that doesn't have the microsoft activation virus come with it is windows 2000, which is very stable. Plenty of copies on Ebay for a good price and no activation to mess with, so no problems when upgrading motherboard or other parts of a computer. It also can still be loaded on a FAT32 or NTFS partition, as can XP. Vista and beyond can read FAT32 but will only load onto NTFS partitions. Data recovery on NTFS partitions can be tricky sometimes to recover, especially if encryption was used.

based computers, mostly HP I think, but not certain of the details.

It has totally crashed some past the point of restoring to an early state as I understand it.

So if you haven't installed it, be careful and do a bit of checking up.

It got my brother-in-law for one.