Hard Disk UpgradeHard 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
chkdsk x: /f /r
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 |