[Techtalk] method to replace bad disk

[Sarah Newman]

Pat,

I've spent the last 2 weekends repairing windows XP so hopefully I can 
provide some insight....

a) If you have another XP machine, consider checking out bartPE.  It is 
a windows live CD which allows you to run a virus / spyware scan. etc. 
external to the main install.  I used this last week to clean my dad's 
computer of some virus (virtumundo I think.)

b) In addition to that, the xp CD itself comes with a "recovery mode" 
which can be used to run scandisk/chkdsk as well as some other useful 
utilities.  The XP cd can also sometimes be used to do a repair install 
of XP, which I would not recommend unless you've tried everything else.

c) "never ending" disk scans usually do.

As an anecdote, I had a failed XP SP3 install last night and got into a 
reboot loop probably because of turning off the computer at a bad time - 
  the system partition wasn't even recognized as NTFS.  I used the XP CD 
to run chkdsk on the drive and it came back up OK.

--Sarah

Sunbird wrote:
> What would be the better way of reconstituting a failed disk in windows xp?
> 
> I have at the ready an iso, CloneZilla Live, hoping it could be so easy, but suspect not.
> The failed disk occurred, I think, when I deleted a folder that appeared to have a file infected by virus, reported by AVG.
> 
> I discovered it during scandisk during reboot.  I don't have the details of the failure, just that the scandisk never ended, finding umpteen zillion errors. So I aborted and then windows booted, and then kept rebooting itself.  So I figured I wrecked it.  Huge disk too.  Many apps are installed on it.  Disk L:, so not the root drive.
> 
> So I have a usb very large external disk to backup or clone, hopefully.  But I want to do it right, so am asking for suggestions about how to go about it properly.
> 
> I have the docs in front of me for CloneZilla, but am thinking that windows will not understand what I want to do and I will mess it up.
> 
> -- Pat
> 
> 
>       
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