Hard Disk Upgrade

Hard Disk Upgrade....The Hard Way!

This documents an experiment with disk that originally had an error like the following at WinXP boot time

In this example hdy is your sparehd that you can write to. hdx is your hd that you will only read from!

The following file is either missing or corrupt
C:\Windows\System32\config\system

First I ran SpinRite on the disk to see if it was going bad After 2 weeks straight of running I finally decided to cut my losses and replace the HD. After some trial and error I came up with this solution

1. I pulled the HD out of the suspect box and installed into another with a working copy of windows and ran the following command at the command prompt

chkdsk x: /f /r

1. Then restart your machine and boot into knoppix. I had a spare Hard Disk attached to the machine to help me out here. You are most likely going to want the same
2. Open a shell box, change to root, mount your spare HD to a temp folder

su -
mkdir sparehd
mount /dev/hdy sparehd/
cd sparehd

Copy the Master boot Record

dd if=/dev/hdx of=hdx.mbr count=1 bs=512

Use ntfsclone to grab your ntfs partition

ntfsclone --output hdx1.ntfs.img --save-image /dev/hdx1

If you have other partitions you can get them with

dd if=/dev/hdx2 of=part#.img