Moving old setup to new drive

[Guest]

My laptop wouldn't start due a corrupted registry "hive".

After casting around for solutions on the support web site, none were
particularly helpful, so I got some advice from a geek buddy. His take was
to replace the hard drive, use the restore disk to set up the laptop as it
came from the factory, then copy the info from the old drive to the new one.

However...FAST won't move the applications and settings from one drive on
the the laptop to another. It only wants to work from one computer to
another and since the old drive won't boot, I can't find a way to run FAST
against it anyway.

Does anyone know a relatively easy way to move programs and files from one
drive to another?

 

[Unk]

My laptop wouldn't start due a corrupted registry "hive".

After casting around for solutions on the support web site, none were
particularly helpful, so I got some advice from a geek buddy. His take was
to replace the hard drive, use the restore disk to set up the laptop as it
came from the factory, then copy the info from the old drive to the new one.

However...FAST won't move the applications and settings from one drive on
the the laptop to another. It only wants to work from one computer to
another and since the old drive won't boot, I can't find a way to run FAST
against it anyway.

Does anyone know a relatively easy way to move programs and files from one
drive to another?

Did you try a system restore? or a repair install?

How to start the System Restore tool at a command prompt in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=304449

How to Use System Restore
See the section on "If Windows XP will not start"
http://bertk.mvps.org/

How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade (Reinstallation) of Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=315341
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm
http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_repair_install.htm

 

[Guest]

I looked at the support options and didn't try that because I don't have a
recent enough backup in case the repair caused me to lose data.

There's a small benefit in that I've doubled the drive capacity and will
then have the old drive available to run more regular backups.

However, I'm trying to avoid the hassle of locating media for all of my
applications so I'm attempting to find a solution that will move the apps and
files relatively easily.

 

[Ron Sommer]

The only way to backup your data is to attach the hard drive to a working
computer.
A repair install is not going to affect your data.
You can't move the apps because the apps have information is the Registry.
If a repair install doesn't fix your problem, then you are going to have to
reinstall your programs.