Backing up and restoring laptop drive...

[Hork]

My son's laptop drive is bad, but not completely dead (it is just slow). HP sent me a new one, and suggested that I buy a USB enclosure to use to backup and restore the old drive.

Is there a way to use my network and/or the recovery disks for the system to transfer the data from my old hard drive to the new one they sent me?

 

[bruceb]

No .. you need to use Norton Ghost or Acronis Truimage or a utility from the maker of the Hard Drive
(western digital or seagate etc) .. it is on their web site for download ... use these by following the
exact instructions for CLONING your Hard Drive to a New Drive ... to do this both the OLD and NEW
Drives must be installed in another computer .. say on the 2 IDE connectors to the CD Drives

You can also use Ghost or TruImage to make an Image of the existing hard drive ... then install the
new drive in your computer, restore the Image to the new drive and reinstall it in the laptop

 

[Hork]

I've spent the last 14 hours getting an image using driveimageXML, which I downloaded from Download.com. I saved the image over the network onto some free space on a hard drive in one of my desktop computers.

I did this without a Windows Live CD to use to restore the image onto the new drive. I don't want to go to the trouble of doing that. Here's my new plan. Let me know if you see anything wrong with this...

I'll put the new drive in the USB enclosure I've purchased and attach it to the desktop computer that holds the image files. I'll create partitions like the old ones on the disk in the USB enclosure and restore the images from the desktop files to the usb drive. I'll then take the drive from the USB enclosure and install it in the laptop, replacing the old drive.

 

[bruceb]

That should work, but 14hrs is a very long time ... with Ghost I can image my system (120GB Drive, about 40GB used)
in about 1 hr

 

[Hork]

The hard drive that is going bad is very, very slow.

 

[Hork]

Hmmm... I have attached the USB drive to a desktop system and am creating and formatting partitions of the right size... then I'll restore the image.

I'm partitioning without a drive letter, and I'm still kind of fuzzy about how to make the partition active so it will boot when I place it in the laptop.