Will this work? - creating a bootable HD

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jack
  • Start date Start date
J

Jack

Xcopy will not work in your situation.
It will not copy open files and this will leave windows XP in an unuseable
state.
Your best bet would be to use a ghosting program and I would recommend Ghost
9.0
Shy away from Maxtor, they seem to be having Hard Drive problems in the
past couple years and it has not improved.
Seagate Hard Drives are getting better in the past few months and they
have a 5 year Warrantee now.
Also Western Digitial (at least the 120 Gig, 7200 RPM) does real well.
 
My currrent hard drive is playing silly games so I'm getting concerned that
it may be failing.
Could I plug it into another PC as a slave, copy all the files from it, then
buy a new hard drive, plug that into the other PC and copy all the files
back, then plug into my PC as Master and use the recovery console to do
FIXBOOT/FIXMBR to make the drive bootable?

Will that method work? I've used cloning software before (including Maxtor's
own), but that didn't work properly
 
99.99% of all mfg cloning software will not work with xp.So long as youre
useing IDE drives xps XCOPY will do the job.Simply set new hd as slave on
same ide cable as C:,format the drive in xp-run type:diskmgmt.msc
Once formatted,go to run,type:XCOPY C:\*.* D:\ /c/h/e/k/r Agree to all in
the DOS window,it'll run 5-10 min.,when its thru youre finished.Also,D: being
the slave letter but if asigned other then use that instead of D:
 
Andrew E. said:
99.99% of all mfg cloning software will not work with xp.So long as youre
useing IDE drives xps XCOPY will do the job.Simply set new hd as slave on
same ide cable as C:,format the drive in xp-run type:diskmgmt.msc
Once formatted,go to run,type:XCOPY C:\*.* D:\ /c/h/e/k/r Agree to all
in
the DOS window,it'll run 5-10 min.,when its thru youre finished.Also,D:
being
the slave letter but if asigned other then use that instead of D:
Click to expand...


To the OP...
First of all, if your "hard drive is playing silly games" you've got to find
out just why these "silly games" are being played. If you have system files
corruption on that drive and you clone the contents of that drive to another
drive, your problems will simply be mirrored. If you clone garbage, garbage
is what you'll get.

If, on the other hand, there are some mechanical/electronic problems with
that disk that cause it to "play silly games" and *no* system corruption is
present in the operating system that could be transferred to another drive,
then a clone created by a disk imaging program should work. Use a disk
diagnostic utility from the manufacturer of your HD to determine if it's a
hardware problem.

Assuming the contents of your source disk are without corruption, you can
use the cloning utility that will come with your new HD (or is available
directly from the manuf.) to perform the clone. Your statement that in your
experience "Maxtor's (disk cloning utility) didn't work properly" was no
doubt due to some software/hardware defect or user error and not with the
Maxtor utility. Thousands upon thousands of users have used that software
without any problems.

As to Andrew's comment that "99.9% of all mfg. cloning software will not
work with xp" is absurd and doesn't warrant a response. The XCOPY function
he recommends is so problematical in my experience that I've long since
given it up although I have heard that some users are quite successful with
it.
Anna
 
Jack said:
Xcopy will not work in your situation.
It will not copy open files and this will leave windows XP in an unuseable
state.
Click to expand...

Yes but I was talking about putting my HD in another Windows machine - there
would be no open files as it would not be booting from my HD.
 
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