can I copy the contents of one drive to another.......

[imhotepmp]

my friend has a drive that ha ssome bad sectors on it and he wanted to know if he copied the contents of the bad drive to a new drive, could he boot up with the new drive? Would anything else have to be done to be able to do this? thanks


imhotepmp

 

[Napalm381]

If you use a utility that copies entire partitions, you should be able to do that.

 

[imhotepmp]

so it wont work just by copying it in windows?


imhotepmp

 

[Double Trouble]

Nope, definitely would not work if you copy it in windows.

The best (and easiest) way to do it is to use a utility like drivecopy or Ghost to just copy the entire hard drive to a second hard drive.

If you don't have such a utility, the best way is to copy everything from real DOS -- that way windows doesn't have files open to prevent you from copying them. You can do the dos copy using the XCOPY command with some parameters, but there's also some pre-made tools to help you do it if you are not familiar with DOS. I believe Russ had a 'filecopy' util available somewhere, but you'd have to check with im on that one

 

[chess9]

Can you run Scandisk successfully on the old hard drive? If not, I would guess you have crosslinked files and corrupt data. In which case, the copied data might not ALL be good. In other words, success is not guaranteed.

 

[TrevorK]

Actually, you can use XCopy, which comes with Windows. If you set the switches right, then you can copy EVERYTHING over, reboot and it will be exactly the same copy, just as if you used Ghost. I use this when I set up computers at work so all I need is one master computer.

I think the switches I use are

/s /e /h /k /c /r /y

Sorry for dredging up an old topic, but I found this to be a REALLY easy way to copy HD's.

------
Trevor

 

[imhotepmp]

thanks for the assistance guys, xcopy worked out perfectly

imhotepmp

 

[DABANSHEE]

There's a PowerQuest utility call Drivecopy, that's the bees knees at this sort of thing.