Did you try the restore?
My experience with PING is that: a) on a drive with errors, the backup may not complete, and b) it sometimes is unable to restore the saved image. The restore process will look like it completes, but the restored disk will be unusable.
A significantly complicating factor is that Windows XP installations tend to become corrupt as a computer slowly dies, making it hard to determine if the problem is software or hardware or both. Additionally, I'm not convinced backing up and restoring a computer with potentially defective hardware is even a good idea. Specifically, I suspect that PING assumes that it is running on perfect hardware. When confronted with old and potentially defective hardware, it does not implement sufficient error checking and recovery code to deal with random small data errors. Once a few of these errors occur, the backup becomes unusable.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
