help needed

davehey79

right dunno if wat to do so ill post here see if someone know wat to do.
my 20gig hd crashed/almost dead at the moment yesterday evenin its been making funny sounds the last few days just hadnt got round to installing xp on another hard drive.
in my comp i had the 20gig hd with all the windows/programme files on it and an 80gig for all my stuff and and 80gig external drive for sisters stuff.
had xp pro sp2 on the 20gig. cleared the 80gig hd with the sis stuff on it in windows management by full format and put it in to the comp as slave drive and tried to install xp on it cant cos of xp sp2 on 20gig being newer than my disk version. ok tried to remove it but because the 20 gig is on its last legs(hours even) can only get so far with it then it grinds to a stop.
then i thought right ill take it out and put the 80gig in set as master and fresh install.. but when it gets past the bios screen GRUB appears on screen and the computer beeps like mad.

what im thinking my bro has xp sp1 on his comp so im gonna put my 80gig blank harddrive into his as slave, clone his harddrive to mine put it into mine, then re-install my xp over that.

all help appreciated in a bit of a muddle.

davehey79

anyone!!

Occidental

Easiest way would be Norton Ghost and clone the 20gb to the 80gb. Doesn't matter if this is done with the drives installed in your PC or on the 2nd controller on your brothers.

davehey79

so i could clone his 20gig hd to my 80gig hd and then put the 80gig in my comp and it would work? then reinstall xp over that so i use my copy and my product key.

Occidental

If your 20gb drive will hold up long enough, use Ghost to clone your 20gb to the 80gb. Then remove 20gb, set the 80gb as master or CS and work away as normal.

davehey79

thats the thing i dont think it will. i tried uninstalling xp sp2 from it so i could install xp sp1 onto the 80gig one. got as far as deleting the xp sp2 files and then it crunched to a halt again.
ive been online here in work and downloaded the setup disks for maxtor,seagate and western digital hd's so gonna try the appropraite one on the 80gig not sure which make it is of those but its one of them. this should format it make it ready etc. to put xp fresh install onto it or so im hoping. do you think that will work. that way ill avoid cloning and copying stuff as i dont think the 20gig will last for that. i also have created a windows dos startup disk too which should if that fails let me partition/set up the drive also.

wat do ya think??

Curry Monster

Ghost would be a good one to try. there are settings in the software that will allow ghost to carry on even if it finds a bad sector. But yes if the read heads and mechanic's are doggy then it might still fail...well worth a try but.

If this fails then I would suggest loading a new drive and then setting up the bad disk as a slave and try and drag your important files across.

Regards

davehey79

got it sorted any way with help from seagates website which has some setup tools to download for the 80gig hd that got me sorted and allowed me to fresh install xp on it. dumped the old drive.


thanks for your help on this one Occidental and Curry Monster.