Advice sought: replacing a dying hard drive under Windows

[ciphergoth]

Help! lovelybug's hard drive is dying; the logs are full of errors and her applications are falling apart.

I've bought a larger replacement. My first thought was to make a bit-for-bit copy of the old drive onto the new, but that fell over trying to copy sectors that seem to have become entirely unreadable.

The machine runs Windows XP Pro. I could install Windows on the new hard drive and copy over the files; this would have the advantage that the applications could all be reinstalled and might start working again. But where do I get a copy of Windows to install (the machines did not come with Windows install disks) and how do I re-use our existing Windows license?

NB lovelybug wants to continue using Windows XP, though of course I'm more than happy to use Linux based tools for the low-level stuff.

Comments

[pengshui-master.livejournal.com]

My tricks for recovering windows partitions fall into to categories for mildly damaaged discs I do:-
Boot to BartsPE,
chkdsk /f drive:
Use diskpart to partiton new drive.
format new drive
use robocopy to copy files with the /w:0 /R:0 - otherwiae it retries for EVAR!!.

Else
gnu Rescue dd, old drive to new from rescue linux disc.
Then bartsPe to chskdsk /f
and diskpart to expand the partition to fill the space.

If BartsPE isn't available a Vista Install disc will work, but and XP really won't sorry.

You should find BartsPE builder downloadable of the intertubes as well as the incredibly useful robocopy.exe, which is in most of the microsoft resource kits.

[pengshui-master.livejournal.com]

Oh, I forgot you if you use method 1, You'll need to use the recovery console to fixboot/fixmbr to restore the bootstrap.