Ghost it or Nuke and Pave?

[coffee]

Lots of great ideas. Thanks to everyone posting. Here is what I did and what is going on now:

I did a dd_rescue of the recovery partition (sda1) and the O/S (sda3) just in case. Then I did some homework on clonezilla and used expert mode. Iam presently doing a disk to disk clone in expert mode. I have selected the rescue option. This is going to take quite a while. I figure after doing the clone I will run a chkdsk on the new drive and hopefully it will boot ok as the old drive would boot up windows but ran into problems later as it encountered bad sectors.

So, It sits cloning and I will post back what I encounter after its all done hopefully sometime this afternoon.

I know from the previous posts of others that N/P is the basic standard option. However, I do not have restore cds. The restore is on the hard drive.

So, Cloning will provide some benefits. 1. Restore partition will be preserved. 2. Customers installed programs will be preserved. 3. No running around looking for drivers for the hardware. 4. Restoring customers private files not needed. This all is of course dependent on a sucessful clone.

Thanks again everyone for your thoughts. Ill post back later!

 

[PC-MOT]

9/10 I do a clone, like you say, much easier (again, where possible)

 

[Rob_NNCC]

I do a clone first, then if the system needs more than a little repair and a chkdsk on bootup I do a fresh install or a repair/upgrade.

I just find that our customers love hearing that everything will work just like before the problem occurred. Also, too many times I have had someone say 'I am missing xyz.' Well, you never told me you wanted the xyz folder hidden in the program files folder...

 

[coffee]

I finished the clone and everything worked out quite well. I did run a chkdsk on it and all is fine. Nice to have one of these work out once and awhile.

Thanks again for all the posts. I havent really ghosted in awhile and never had the need. But, If I do ever get another drive with bad sectors come in I will most definately ghost the drive. Makes things alot easier in my opinion.

But not every drive can you do that as others have said. I understand that fully. But this time I really did luck out.

thanks all, Have a great day!!