[90c4]

I'm replacing my primary hard drive due to bad sectors. Can I just format and partition a new drive in an external enclosure and ghost an image of my current drive and restore it to the new one? I'm running XP. The thought of installing windows again, and all my software, depresses me. Alternatively, as I've never ghosted before, could I just copy all the files from C the new drive (I can do it from another PC so XP won't be active).

 

[e vey]

I install the new drive in the box. Master, Slave, whatever, it doesn't matter. Then I run Ghost and put everything on the new drive. Then I remove the old drive and set the new drive up as master of IDE0.


This should work for you. But I see two potential problems

1. The bad sectors may not allow Ghost to operate properly. You may have to scandisk and try several times.


2. You may have to run the XP repair utility from the CD to fix things up as far as booting.


If you can't run Ghost, you can boot up into safe mode and copy the files. You may run into some trouble with the page file and then you would have to run the repair utility from the XP CD.

 

[john12345]

Are you using XP Pro? Do you have a large enough spare disk to hold a backup file of the C: drive? Is the new drive at least as large as the original drive. If using a large disk is it a recent version of XP (like SP1)? If so you could do an ASR backup of the whole C: drive to a single file on the spare drive.


After the backup you install the new C: drive as master and the spare drive any way. You specify the CD-ROM as the boot drive and load the XP CD into it and also supply the floppy that was created in the process. The PC will boot off the CD and as it starts it'll ask if you want to do an ASR recovery. Choosing the ASR recorvery it'll then restore the C: drive to exactly the same state as the original from the backup file.


The XP backup will skip files on bad blocks gracefully and will give you a report of files it couldn't backup. If none of the important system files are hosed the system should be exactly as it was before.

 

[pen25]

have you ran chkdsk and scandisk?? how many bad sectors?? on my dell i have bad sectors and lost clusters once a week but the hard drive is fine.. it is just a little corruption from the use of a program i just dont know which one..

 

[Keh]

A couple of possible questions:


1.) Are you letting Windows go through a normal 'shutdown' to ensure all buffers are re-written (not just killing power)? Is a program 'crashing' during the shutdown?


2.) Have you 'tweaked'/overclocked the system in regard to FSB and memory settings? Keep in mind that higher FSBs require a longer RAS ACTIVE setting so that data transfer is not cut off in mid-stream.

 

[90c4]

Thanks for the replies - I rarely shut down my system. Usually just for installs. It's on 24/7. I don't overclock either. I actually just reinstalled Windows on a new drive and all is good now