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

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

The way I do this (on 2000, though they will be much the same) is to do a parallel install onto a separate partition on the new disk, boot into it, then use xcopy with appropriate options ("/E /C /F /H /K /O" I believe) to copy the original boot partition over to its final resting place on the new disk. (Leaving the new disk with three partitions: system, boot, and the parallel install boot.)

Edit both boot.inis to include the all possible bootable partition, with or without the old disk installed. Reboot and hopefully the number of things that go wrong is managable at this point. Usually drive letter assignments need to be tweaked. Yank the old disk and remove unused boot.ini entries when all seems well.

Keeping a useful number of choices in boot.ini is key - recovery console can fix MBR and bootsector issues, copy files and disable services, but it doesn't (bah!) have a text editor or general registry editor so you need a bootable OS to edit boot.ini.

If other hardware has changed, the situation gets interesting (60 hours so far and counting, but mostly there now, and the latter half has mostly been showing off.)

This does require install media though, preferably slipstreamed up to whatever level you were already running. And it being XP you're probably at some point going to have to beg Microsoft's permission to carry on using the product you already bought.

[pengshui-master.livejournal.com]

Blah.
xcopy good., Robocopy better. It guarantees copy the ntfs security attributes with the /copyall switch. I've never needed to do a parallel install as long as the COM+ catalog is not corrupt. And just don't ask about that one.

I'm assuming there is no hardware changes that, as you say can get interesting - I normally find you need to rename the intelppm.sys driver to prevent it loading (because as you say - the recovery console cant do it) if you are moving off an intel chipset board. Other than that it works pretty well. Of course changing your motherboard is technically only allowed with OEM (not microsoft interestingly!) permission. ALthough you may need to beg microsoft's permission if it has a OEM key for activation.

Having said that, if the windows image is so badly damaged that none of the above works - your instruction are pretty much what I'd do.

[deliberateblank.livejournal.com]

I like using simple tools whose behaviour I can predict. Windows is unpredictable enough. Keeping permissions is what the /O switch is for. The parallel installation is so that Windows doesn't have any of the source files open for exclusive access - the main problems being the registry hives, which you can't really do without. Having a parallel install lying around is sometimes a useful thing in itself - I've had all sorts of random software that should know better decide that making my system unbootable is the way forward. It doesn't survive long.

The way to start a complete hardware migration is to go into Device Manager and Uninstall all the drivers for the current motherboard (without rebooting until you've got all of them!). The recovery console *can* actually do this bit, since it can disable services/drivers, (and move/rename files) but it's easier in Device Manager, and fixing errors is easier in a parallel install. Then pray that something didn't blat over ntdll.dll with a pre-Win2K RTM version. Bastards.

(I have a boxed retail version, so can move it completely between hardware at will as long as I only keep one instance.)

[pengshui-master.livejournal.com]

I like using simple tools whose behaviour I can predict.
Me too, TBH that's why outside of work I only use Unix. Simple tools....

OTOH robocopy has acted pretty predictable for me. I can't recall what the problem with xcopy was - but there was a reason I changed to using robocopy.

The parallel installation is so that Windows doesn't have any of the source files open for exclusive access

Ahh. I solve this problem by working from a Live windows or Linux CD such as bartsPE or Knoppix.

In my case this is a serious win becuase I often have to repair PCs I've never seen before and the quicker I can do it the more I earn.

I thought you were suggesting doing a parallel install and migrating the setup to that, rather than using it as rescue environment.

the way to start a complete hardware migration is to go into Device Manager
It's quite hard to blat all the drivers in device manager before changing the hardware if the motherboard has gone titsup though!. I've seen machine's even fail to start in safemode hence the preventive rename. And disabling the drivers in recovery console doesn't work -I've tried it. Even though they have service names.

I also seem to recall this sort of thing is a little harder in Xp than win2k as well. But it's been a while since I hand to do much recovery for win2k.

[ashmere.livejournal.com]

This article is should be useful

http://www.labnol.org/software/rebuild-computer-and-reinstall-windows/6130/