Originally Posted by Feorthas
Ouch, that sucks.
And by 'that' I mean both system restore and the driver nuking your box--unless MS has drastically improved their restore functionality.
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System restore has been completely rewritten from scratch in Vista. It's now based on the volume shadowcopy service that existed in older versions of Windows but was defaulted off. Any time a modification is written to the hard drive, the diff between the new block and old block is saved. Hidden virtual drives on your system will actually allow you to look at the exact state of your hard drive at any day over the past few weeks, depending on how much space is allocated for this (defaults to 15% of disk space).
Unfortunately, system restore itself isn't any more intelligent in deciding which files are system related and which are personal documents. It just uses a list of file extensions which are to be restored, and excludes any others. I wish they had added the feature to let you do a complete restore of everything, instead you would need a 3rd party app to do that.