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

Gparted

[kingginger.livejournal.com]

Use that - And it may be able to copy the whole disk to the new disk - including expanding the partitions etc.
have both disks plugged in - assume that is possible?

But it will work if you have one in a USB caddy too...

Then just remember to tag the new disk volume with the boot label...

Download the Live CD ISO
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115843&package_id=271779

(or http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ and follow links )

Just run with the defaults on bootup (rarely a need to change) -
then just use the GUI to copy from a to b :-)

Good luck.