Copy Drive

[vich]

I have 2 Dell Inspririon 1500's that one had the had disk crash. I unfortunately can not find the source or recovery disks. Is it possible to "clone" the drive of the working unit to a new drive for the crashed unit?

If so what program would you recommend.

Or is it possible to do something with the files in the i386 folder?

I have some Windows XP disks and the actual key but am concerned about drivers. They are 2005 units.

Thanks

 

[edfair]

Should be able to do a clone, but that will probably take 2 adapter kits to be able to do it on a desktop machine with multiple IDE channels available.

Ghost would do it.

But then again, how about Acronis and a disk image on an external USB based hard drive then a recovery onto the new hard drive?


Until you sort out the recovery stuff it might be well to keep an image available.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[fisheromacse]

1) if you do not have one, get an adapter for your laptop hard drive to USB (not necessarily from here, but something like this

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020&cat=CBL

)
2) boot the good laptop to acronis CD or BARTPE CD w/Ghost
3) if you do not have an external USB hard drive you can directly clone the good system to the other drive plugged into a USB port on the laptop booted to CD via the above adapter.
4) Or (a better solution) clone the drive to an image, saved to an external USB hard drive then clone the image onto the other drive.


Also, worst case and you end up using generic XP install disks, Dell has a the majority of their drivers available via the web page

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/index.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&~ck=anavml

 

[rclarke250]

Make sure your laptop doesn't have sata hard drives, if it does, and your desktop machine has a couple of free ports, just use the cables from the desktop as the cables and spacing are the same, remove your boot drive, and use ultimate boot disk to do the clone, make sure you know which drive is which before you do the clone, copy hdd model and serial numbers down, and which is the good image, and which is the bad. most times you can even just use a hdd manufactures hdd setup disk to do the clone, only one of the drives needs to be from the manufacturer of the tool, i.e seatools for seagate.