hard drive failing

[Guest]

Running XP Home and two hard drives, working independantly from each other.
S.M.A.R.T has flagged up a impending failure of my windows hard drive.
Question.
Can I copy the entire contents of my failing drive across to the other drive
and once I've replaced the faulty drive - reverse the process. If this is
possible can I have full details of the procedure. Thanks

 

[Mistoffolees]

Running XP Home and two hard drives, working independantly from each other.
S.M.A.R.T has flagged up a impending failure of my windows hard drive.
Question.
Can I copy the entire contents of my failing drive across to the other drive
and once I've replaced the faulty drive - reverse the process. If this is
possible can I have full details of the procedure. Thanks

Ideally, make a disk image of the Windows partition as well as
copy its contents to the other drive as a safety backup. The
image is going to be important since Windows does not allow some
of its system files to be copied [because they are "in use" at
the time]. And having the image file should also make it easier
to restore the Windows partition on the replacement drive.

 

[Ron Martell]

Running XP Home and two hard drives, working independantly from each other.
S.M.A.R.T has flagged up a impending failure of my windows hard drive.
Question.
Can I copy the entire contents of my failing drive across to the other drive
and once I've replaced the faulty drive - reverse the process. If this is
possible can I have full details of the procedure. Thanks

If your new drive comes with an installation disk or CD from the
manufacturer then that will usually contain a disk cloning utility
which will copy the old drive to the new one.

If not then go to the hard drive manufacturer's web site (for either
the old or the new drive) and download their disk cloning utility.

Most manufacturers have these utilities available and about the only
restriction on them is that at least one of the disks involved has to
be from that manufacturer. So you can't use the Seagate utility to
copy an old Western Digital drive to a new Samsung. But either the
Western Digital or Samsung utilities would work in this example.

Good luck

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2006)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."

 

[cquirke (MVP Windows shell/user)]

erolwoolley wrote:

Ideally, make a disk image of the Windows partition as well as
copy its contents to the other drive as a safety backup. The
image is going to be important since Windows does not allow some
of its system files to be copied [because they are "in use" at
the time]. And having the image file should also make it easier
to restore the Windows partition on the replacement drive.

Yep: First copy off your data files (in case the HD dies halfway
through the partition imaging process - half a partition image is no
cigar) then use Boot It NG (BING) or similar imaging tool to copy off
the XP partition as a solid image.

The latter's important, because even if you copy every signle file
from old HD to the new one, and get your master and partition boot
records right etc., XP will NOT boot. There's something nebulous
within the file system that has to be just so, else it won't boot
(though a "repair install" will messily fix this)

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