[Ham-Computers] RE: Hard drive crash

[Hsu, Aaron (NBC Universal)]

Eugene,

When you XCPOPY'd everything from the old drive to the new drive, was this
from a DOS-window?  Or did you boot from a floppy and XCOPY straight from
DOS?

If you did the latter (boot from floppy), then the long filenames weren't
kept and that's probably where the problems lie.  Long filenames were added
in Win95 and bootable DOS floppies don't include LFN support.  Your
shortcuts are looking for the LFN's, but XCOPY only copied the underlying
"short" filenames (SFN's).

I believe your intent was to save time by re-installing the OS on top of
your old, possibly corrupted, installation of WinME.  Unfortunately, since
the old drive is failing anyways, the best bet was to re-install
*everything* from scratch as the applications are also possibly corrupted.

If you still have the original HD intact, this is what I would do...

1. Remove all the HD's from the system.  Then just install the new HD.
2. Delete the contents of the new HD and start from scratch (FDISK and
remove partitions).
3. Install WinME from scratch on the new HD.  Make sure to get all Windows
updates  Better yet, if you can, get a version of WinXP...WinME is the WinOS
Microsoft (and others!) wish they never released.
4. Install a good Anti-virus program and get all updates.
5. Put the old HD back in the system as a secondary drive (preferrably on a
different controller than the boot HD)

At this point, I would go through and install any applications I use on a
regular basis.  If you know where the application keeps settings in a
certain folder, then copy that folder from the old HD to the same path on
the new HD before installing the app.  This way, the app should be able to
use the old options/preferences.  Doesn't work for all programs though (esp
if the settings are stored in the registry).

Yes, it's tedious, but it ensures system integrity.  If the new system you
put together is built from a corrupted base, then you're sure to need to do
it all again very soon.  Save yourself the future headache and do it right
the first time.

Now, if you're installing a new HD to replace an older HD, then there are
appropriate apps out there that will do it for you (including the one that
comes with new drives).  Good commercial software include GHOST, Drive
Image, and a couple others.  These will do a proper file-by-file copy and
keep the OS in-tact.  In fact, it will also allow FAT-to-NTFS conversions
during the "cloning" (but not NTFS to FAT).

73,

  - Aaron, NN6O
    (nn6o)@arrl.net



-----Original Message-----
From: EUGENE [mailto:erastber at tampabay.rr.com] 
Sent: Saturday, August 14, 2004 4:58 PM
To: ham-computers at mailman.qth.net
Subject: [Ham-Computers] Hard drive crash


Perhaps someone on the list can help me with this problem:
One of my PC's has a HDD (Maxtor) that was starting to fail. I installed a
second HDD (Also Maxtor) and used their copy program to clone the original,
but the pgm kept telling me that there were problems with the disk. So, I
did an XOOPY and copied everyting from the original disk to the new one.
Then I re-installed WINME. (I know that when you clone a disk you can clone
all of the problems, but these problems were with the disk and not the
programs). Most of the desktop is as original, but over half of the
shortcuts do not work and when I go to the actual folder, the program also
does not work. I KNOW that I should have backed everything up BEFORE this
happened, but alas, I did not. (Since this happened, I bought a 250 GB WDD
networkable backup system...) So, the bottom line questions are:  "Is there
a way to 'transfer' programs from one HDD to another?" (BTW, with the
original HDD, it would work OK some of the time and about every second or
third time of boot up, it would say Boot failure, insert a system disk.) If
there is anyone out there that can help me with this, it would be GREATLY
APPRECIATED! Thanks in advance, Gene, WØQFC Spring Hill, FL
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