Hard Drive Failure: Full HTPC Recovery with just one Re-boot

[OTAJuncqui]

Last Sunday I awoke to my BIOS being displayed on my TV asking if I would accept the changes. I realized that my OS drive was missing and had failed. It was a fine Samsung 300GB that had spent the first 4.5 years of 6 in a networked office environment and had served me well (R.I.P.). That left me with NO TV! So 2-3 hours later I had rebuilt the system and things got back to normal but then I realized, "What if this had happened during prime time?".
Long story short(er) I now have a dual boot system with two identical OSes and Apps on separate physical drives. I use NextPVR, so to keep the "ReserveOS"'s EPG and recording info current I run a scheduled batch hourly that copies and replaces the two files NPVR needs to stay up to date (config.xml and npvr.db3).
Some would want to accomplish this using RAID1 or other software but I'm not very familiar with mirroring and believe that it would involve alot of un-necessary disk writing compared to two puny files every hour.
The "ReserveOS" lies in wait unused appart from MS updates.
So, if the 5 year old 80GB Maxtor drive that is my "WorkingOS" fails I'm one re-boot away from where I was before it did.