replacing hard drive and transferring applications

[jctl27]

I have a 4-year-old Thinkpad T40 running windows XP pro, and when I had it repaired a little while ago, the technician recommended that I replace the hard drive, which was on the verge of failing, and reinstall windows.
To do this, I've bought a new hard drive and a enclosure for my old drive. I've also got IBM recovery CDs, so I can format the new drive, install windows, and get the laptop back to an "as-purchased" state. I had planned on putting the old, corrupted drive in the USB enclosure and running it as a slave drive to transfer my data.
Here's my question -- What's the best way to transfer applications from my old drive to my new drive? I will be able to do a fresh install from discs or the web for some of my programs, but not all. There are application transfer programs out there, but they seem to depend on having to computers, which I won't -- I'll just have the one computer with the new drive as master and the old drive as slave.
Any suggestions? Thanks.

 

[blazerazor]

Personally I have never had any luck with any magical backup programs or setting transfers. Maybe its old fashioned, but its always been me to back up all the files myself and reinstall all the drivers, updates and progy's after a fresh install. But some ppl praise doing a image of your system after getting it tweaked, works in theory., but I havent actually try'd it. T40, thats a good lappy. I still have a T22. And love it. My old reliable black box. Anyway, a Bump for you answer.

btw, welcome to AT.

 

[yinan]

Use Acronis True Image to write an image of the old hard drive to a network share. Then install the new drive and restore the image to it.

Jim

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: yinan
Use Acronis True Image to write an image of the old hard drive to a network share. Then install the new drive and restore the image to it.

Jim

Free if you own a maxtor or seagate drive

 

[jctl27]

Doing a drive image seemed to be the simplest way, but wouldn't that also transfer the corrupted windows installation? My computer's really been bogging down lately, and I want to start as fresh as possible.
Thanks for all the help.

 

[Homerboy]

Originally posted by: jctl27
Doing a drive image seemed to be the simplest way, but wouldn't that also transfer the corrupted windows installation? My computer's really been bogging down lately, and I want to start as fresh as possible.
Thanks for all the help.

yes
sadly the answer to your problem is there is no answer.
Its either clone the whole HDD over to a new HDD (acronis Migrate easy is nice for this too)

Likley the best solution is do a clean install of windows on the new HDD with your old HDD as secondary drive in the system.
Manually install each new required program, but then copy over the old directory to the new directory. 9 times of of ten this will save your settings, preferences, options etc.

Its the only way to get a GOOD solid install of Windows and retain (as best possible) your old programs and settings.