Dying drive, tried to Image using ghost and acronis. Was there a better way?

[Majestic]

I had a client with a dying 80gb seagate hard drive on a domain running Windows XP Pro. I copied his entire profile successfully to the server and had a new replacement 500gb drive. My goal was to get him the machine back up and running as quickly and painlessly as possible. He did have another machine to use in the meantime though.

I figured I could simply ghost with crc ignore on to the new drive. Actually, I tried to ghost first then it failed with a bad sector error, THEN I tried again with crc ignore on. Well, that did not work.. it just kind of froze on a sector and I waited more than 20 minutes without seeing it move where I rebooted, tried it once more and waited less time but it still froze up there.

So I tried Acronis true image. Which I learned the hard way is TERRIBLE for resizing from a smaller drive to a bigger drive if its got a typical restore partition on the machine. Anyway, all this to say that I used Acronis and of course it stopped with an error as well.

I booted ubcd4win and copied (with errors here and there) using teracopy (so it does not abort) windows, documents and settings (not all only what is necessary) and program files as well as all the hidden files in the root such as boot.ini etc.

I made sure the new drive was an active partition and booted up the windows recovery console, put in FIXMBR and rebooted the machine.

No go. I got a windows\system32\config\system error. So... I rebooted up with ubcd4win, tried a registry restore which did not work. I tried XPHiveRepair (www.whatsmypass.com), still no go. I tried to perform a windows repair install but it did not SEE the windows install. I also tried a microsoft article where has a script to copy the necessary files.. no go.

In the end, I had to reinstall fresh and that includes the email, programs, configuration on the domain, etc. Ironically had I done that in the first place it would have saved me HOURS of wasted time (except for the profile copy to the server which was necessary).

What I'd like to know is a) what did I do wrong that windows did not boot? I'm assuming when windows was being copied a few core files was missing? b) What would be a better approach for this as I do not intend on having to reinstall a machine every single time except as a last resort when every repair attempt fails (of course within reason and reasonable time).

Any suggestions, words of wisdom, would be appreciated!

Majestic

 

[purple_minion]

I've not tried it but I would guess simply copying files doesn't preserve important information. Also you said there were errors, which most likely were caused by bad sectors, which led to corrupt system files. If the drive was dying it might have also slowly corrupted itself over time and when you got to it simply pushed it over the edge with one more critical error.

I myself would have used ddrescue, but getting the important stuff is what matters. You may have had to nuke it anyway.

 

[Laimbo]

Hi Majestic,

I find using the "force clone" option under the misc tab in Ghost usually prevents bad sector errors. I also use crc ignore although I think force clone makes it obsolete. I have not had the bad sectors errors using force clone although sometimes it can take a long time to clone (24+ hours). Normally if I can see the disk I can ghost it. But if not I would copy as much of their documents and such as I can and do a fresh install.

 

[Cambridge PC Support]

I nearly always do an N&P if a drive has got a lot of bad sectors

you never know what's been corrupted and/or missing

 

[JRDtechnet]

I think CRC ignore is if your putting an image back on a HDD so it ignores any errors in the imag file. Force clone is what you want when your imaging a disk.
Posted via Mobile Device

 

[NYJimbo]

I have to say I am always confused when people here say "image". Do they mean they imaged the drive while it was live, that is they created an image file from the machine that was already running windows OR do they mean they took the drive out of the machine, slaved it to something else and then used a boot disk to bring up its own environment and then make a true copy, without any restrictions of the original O/S ?.

Whenever I do a "image" or "clone" I always do it when the drive is removed from the original machine in a standalone or "clone" environment like Acronis Migrate Easy or some unix/linux stuff like DD or a boot disk.

 

[Majestic]

I think CRC ignore is if your putting an image back on a HDD so it ignores any errors in the imag file. Force clone is what you want when your imaging a disk.
Posted via Mobile Device

I actually made a mistake when I expressed it because I did not remember the exact switch.. I had used Force clone.

Majestic

 

[jschalk]

KNOPPIX is my baby, use ddrescue when a disk is really dead.