Windows 7 Recovery Tool
 

I am here to tell you twice now I have had to pop the Windows 7 disc in and bring my hdd back from the depths of hell and Microsoft got it right this time. Windows 7 is the easiest, most user friendly recovery tool they have come up with to date. I've had some XP recovery's that took me hours of trial and error. Windows 7 has a nice lil pop up window with well layed out options that a fool could get right. Click what you want to do and forget about it.

I have not had to use this yet and hopefully never :)
I use Acronis for full image backups and recovery is very easy if I ever have to.

Is running system protection pretty much required for this tool to work ?

I've been using TerabyteUnlimited's Image for dos for a while now. Its a bit on the slow side but has byte for byte verification and hasn't failed me yet.