this would be great on the sony; taken from fujitsu specs for P5000 series:

Easy Recovery System
PowerQuest® Drive Image® Special Edition (DISE) provides a way to restore your computer to the original factory image if you experience a hard drive crash or other system failure. The image is saved on a separate partition on the hard drive. You can also use DISE to create a personal image file. It is especially helpful if you have installed additional applications onto your notebook.

Your personal image file will contain all of the installed applications. In the event you should need to perform a recovery, you can restore the image that includes the applications and data files you use. With this hard drive recovery system, you can use DISE no matter where you are and when you need it. It’s that easy and convenient.

Sony should offer some sort of software like many other companies are doing. Laptop magazine did a review of a few solutions last month with IBM’s being head and shoulders above any brand with the ability to get back up and running in 30 minutes.

In all fairness, the Fujitsu recovery software is only ok and rudimentary at best. It assumes you can still access the drive to restore it. If the disk drive crashes and you can’t even access it then Fujitsu’s DISE (Drive Image SE) won’t do you any good. On my P2120 I still had to make a DVD backup of the DISE image just in case the drive ever went out. Also, the image file needs to be located in the exact location. You can’t move it around or put it in another directory otherwise the restore won’t work.

It would be nice for Sony to include some software but I prefer to use my own software for this since it’s been much more reliable for me. One of the first things I install in Acronis TrueImage and I make an exact copy of the drive to my external USB2 hard drive.

well, i’d be happy with the fujitsu solution.  powerquest software is very good albiet mucho dollars.  and doing what you describe, backing up the disaster partiition on cd takes 15 minutes.  i have spent DAYS!!! trying to get a disaster recovery system to work on my tr1.  i’ll probally create a disaster BEFORE i find something that works.  acronis does not work here, it won’t write reliably to the CDR.  I’m playing with an evaluation of backupmypc but that’s even worse.  the problem with these tools (i think i am getting this right) is that either they don’t catalog the backups or they do and they don’t use them. in the first case there is no way to verify that what’s backup up is any good, and in the second case if the media fails in the middle of a 20 cd backup, then ya gotta start all over from scratch, and toss the cds.  so for now, i am setting my own restore points, manually copying important files to an external usb hard drive, once in while making a cd of that,  and then planning to use sony’s recovery cds if things go really wrong with the system.  in other words, doing a lot of work that i should not have to do and having no security that i will be able to restore my system EXECTALLY in case of emergency. and i really like my system just the way it is.
jig