Ever have a computer just totally die on you in the middle of testing? Of course, if you’re testing a new product, it’s not that uncommon to have it crash, and sometimes even corrupt the system. The problem is if you’ve still got data on that computer that you need to get to – or even the debug logs to see what happened before every went to heck. Problem is, what do you use to get into your dead computer?

As long as you can still boot from a CD, you’ve got options. Check out this article from PCWorld: Six Downloadable Boot Discs That Could Save Your PC

And don’t forget to back up your system! Even if you can reproduce the data, you probably don’t want to spend the time (and your boss doesn’t want to spend the money on your salary) to get it back.

Just a quick note, if you’re using MSXML (Microsoft XML Core Services), make sure you test and retest your installation routines. If your customers have upgraded to Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, you may run into issues. As of SP3, Microsoft has placed MSXML under system protection so that applications/installations that try to update/remove MSXML fail. The most common occurrence of this has been with Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft has posted a work-around on their website. However, last thing you want to be doing is fielding support calls, emails, and tickets because of this issue. We just caught this testing another company’s product and thought we’d pass it along. Hopefully, Microsoft will help developers in handling this issue.

When you’re trying to test your website with many different web browsers, you often run into problems. In particular, Windows really isn’t designed to have multiple versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) installed at the same time. You could setup multiple platforms and maybe use a KVM to save space, but most of us don’t have the room for all that equipment just sitting around all the time.

As we mentioned in a previous post, a good solution to the issue is to setup multiple “virtual machines” (VMs) on your computer. Each VM has it’s own operating system and storage so you can install a version of Internet Explorer in each virtual machine. We also have previously discussed how you use VMs to learn how to use Linux and try out the various distributions (distros). Many of the distros already have pre-rolled VMs available (via VMware’s site or various image sites like this one for Virtual Box), but sometimes there’s that one distro you want to try without a VM. What do you do? Easy – roll your own.

Rather than going into the details of setting up your own VM, however, Lifehacker has a great article on how to setup, configure and install operating systems into a virtual machine using Virtual Box. Give it a read – it’s a very well done article!

If you’re performing testing on a Mac and looking for a simple application to ghost/image the hard drive, take a look at Carbon Copy Cloner. I know it seems like you should be able to just copy all the files to an external hard drive and just select it from the Startup Disk preference pane, but it doesn’t work in MacOS X. And, if you’re doing a lot of configuration testing, installation/uninstallation, etc., it would be really handy to have an identical copy of the hard drive, right? Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to the rescue.

Just install CCC (or SuperDuper!) and you can clone a low-level copy of your internal hard drive to another partition or drive. It’s very handy, and if you really want a good backup, you can have it scheduled to update the cloned image so you’ll always have the latest version of all your hard drive files. When my hard drive suffered an unfortunate failure a few years ago, I had no worries – I had an identical copy of my hard drive all setup which allowed me to recover all my work on another Mac. It’s fast, accurate, and donation-ware so you can try it out before you buy.