Crashed Hard Drive Recovery - NOT!

[crokett]

After my HDD crash last week I decided to replace the SCSI drives I had with SATA. I had an image of my installed OS but it didn't have the SATA driver. I restored the image to a SCSI drive, then added the SATA driver. I copied that image over to the new drive, then tried booting and Windows hung. After a few more things decided to just reinstall Windows on the new drive. I did that, then added all the drivers, etc, then did the Windows updates and that somehow broke networking. After trying to fix it the last two nights, I am back to a reinstall.

[cgallery]

I feel your pain. I do this all day long and I normally have a pretty easy time of it. But every once in a while a machine with throw you curve balls.

[Sam Conder]

On Dell workstations, we have to set the SATA mode to Legacy in order to get the machines to boot to Windows after Ghosting. You might try that with yours even if it's not a Dell... might be related.

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...07091316494160

[Kristofor]

Usually setting legacy mode is only required for the actual imaging process (no AHCI drivers at that point), but once restored if all the drivers are in place you should be able to go back to native mode.

That said, for home use, I'll almost always take the time for a clean install on a different/new drive (TB drives can be had for ~$60 now, but my system drive is a small (160GB) intel SSD at this point (HUGE performance increase).

It takes a little while longer to reload, but the end result is so much nicer. I keep all of my apps in an "install" folder on a different machine so unless I want to install a new version I don't even need to download too much. My work apps live in a virtual machine that can be moved from one PC to another without needing to be setup/configured again.

[rjwaldren]

On my most recent clean install of XPpro I had to disable AHCI in BIOS until I completed the install and installed the full HDD drivers (nVidia chipset). I don't recall how it went with Vista but it seems that it gave me problems also.

It may be possible to do a repair install over the new drive once you have completed restoring your image. Legacy SATA will still be required until you get a bootable system.

That said, if there is nothing vital that you can't pull as individual files from the ghost image, a clean install would be best in the long run. Windows becomes such a cruft monster over time and clean installs can make it feel like a new machine.

I was just thinking - Can the old drive be read at all? I have done a clean install to a new drive - Then used the File & Settings Transfer wizard to move the profile from the failed old drive to the new one over the network. In that situation the physically damaged areas of the drive did not affect the users data. In fact it was my bosses PC, where everything under the sun was archived (and not backed up). He didn't even realize that he was running on a completely new PC after the fact, other that to say it seems snappier.

[crokett]

Sam,

Thanks for the tip although I am not sure my adapter has legacy mode. The next time I have to do a restore I see that my Ghost CD has the F6 option for loading additional drivers, so I can load the full driver for the card.

The machine is back up and operating now. I spent more time on it last night. The frustrating thing was after the first install I installed the XP updates and one of them broke the TCP/IP stack. It would not load. I found references to the issue online and fixing it via netsh but that fix did not work for me. From my reading it either worked or didn't and if not you were looking at a reinstall.