Complete Hard Drive Transfer

[RickM]

Hello,
Thank you for taking the time to read this message.
Over a month ago I suffered a house fire. Fortunately I was able to salvage a few things, one being my computer.

I have noticed strange happenings with the computer (Sometimes the HDD is not recognized in the BIOS)and I get the message "Insert system disk and press any key to boot" ... (Sometime the computer re-boots out of the blue) ( Very Sloooowwwww )and I am afraid the HDD is going to crash soon.
I remember the "OLD" days of XCOPY and GHOST etc. I do not know if these programs would make the HDD bootable or if the would work with XP.

What I would like to do is completely copy the contents of a small 20GB HDD that has been doing what I need it to do for a few years not but is getting smaller by the day and getting ready to crash. As you know a 20GB HDD is just about extinct !!

Seeing where I feel it is going to crash soon, I would like to purchase a much larger HDD format and partition it.
Is there a way or a program one of you "Pro's" are aware of that I can copy everything from the 20GB to another HDD and have the new larger HDD boot ?

With the fire I have lost all of my software CD's, Windows XP CD etc. etc. I am trying to have the NEW HDD bootup and have the software still intact. Is there a way to do this ?

Any information will be appreciated.
Thank you for your time.
Rick M.

 

[nickc]

u can go to the manufacturer of the hard drive u are talking about and they will have a test software that will test the hard drive, if it says it is bad u can bet it is and it needs to be replaced, I do not know the name of any of these programs but I do know Maxtor has one that is suppose to work on any brand of hard drive. the better would be to get the one from the manufacture of u're hdd.

 

[Liquidlen]

There are a couple of programs that will do the job, True Image( Acronis) is my favorite,Ghost (Symantec) is another.
These programs come with Bootable disks so you can prepare the new HDD and copy the contents of your old drive.

 

[tipstir]

True Image is the best one and easy to use over your home workgroup network can also be used in Corp Domain network too. It's almost like child play as they say.. Ghost is not that flexiable Drive Image from PowerQuest now Symantec is quick but I don't like using it, mostly used on SMS builds an etc... A lot of companies and small business use Ghost from Symantec.

Right now I True to back each system I've built and Laptops HDDs to another PC on the network to store the Image so just in case something goes wrong I have a current image where I just can restore back and I am up and running again.

True Image you can back up to:

USB 2.0 HDD
NAS
SAN
an etc...

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Take that harddisk out of the original PC and put it temporarily in another PC (set the jumpers to SLAVE), then use one of the above programs (Acronis TrueImage preferably) to copy/backup/image that 20GB oldie.
The image can be 'restored' onto a new harddisk.
Be aware though that the hardware of the new PC must be as identical to the original 20GB-PC as possible, for it to work!
At least you can get all your personal data back, if the hardware of the new PC is too different.

See also this post:
How To: Swap motherboard without clean or upgrade installing Windows
https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic48387.html
which is probably happening in your case.