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]

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/