Just copying the files will not produce a bootable drive as that doesn't copy the hidden files.

I'm told Norton Ghost works pretty well.
If you get a new drive and you have a spare IDE port just hang it off that, we seem to be able to do it OK with it just dangling off the cables. For a greater feeling of security lay the machineon its side on site the drive on a piece of cardboard. It's only temporary so it doesn't have to look pretty.

Ghost is our tool of choice at work for imaging disks. Works great. I use it at home as well for weekly backups, directly to a DVD burner in a firewire case. Ghost 2003 has built in firewire drivers for this. a small Ghost Explorer program also allows you to browse and restore files from backed up volumes.

I second Ghost 2003 I use it too ams it works great.

Use PowerQuest's Drive Image myself .....never had a problem with it, reinstalled maybe half a dozen times fine.

Many times a drive will start to grind away simply becuase its got to the point it severely fragemented. Try doing a overnight defrag and see if the "noises" which could just be excessive movement of the read/write heads due the drive being badly fragemented goes away after.

Of course if it sounds more like a car's transmission that's slipping and making weird sounds that something else again.

Ghost is what most people use, but I have a backup package that includes both drive image, as well as traditional file backup. The image portion of the backup is called NTI DriveBackup! 3, and the traditional backup (which comes in the same package and installs at the same time) is called NTI Backup NOW! 3.

I've used Ghost, but by far my preference is for DriveImage. It seems I am doing things that trash my system about once a month (I have a LOT of processes running simultaneously, and some programs definitely don't like each other). With a clone program like DriveImage and a daily backup routine (BackupMyPC), I can be back in business in about 30 minutes.

If your drive is making noises, I suggest taking off the side of your PC and listening very closely. I've never had a drive fail (though they certainly do), but I've had several fans fail, and when they go they gradually make all sorts of interesting sounds.

BTW, good choice of words. "Yak in a chalk factory" would also be a good name for a rock band.

I've used Norton Ghost 2003 and it is an excellent product, used Deployecentre in the past but the version that I used didn,t support DVD drives. With Ghost you can Ghost your image to a DVD burner (internal or externet with firewire or usb) and then create a boot floppy to re-load the image if required this solution works extremely well.

thanks for the replies. the drive is definitely getting stuck and grinding. i got a copy of powerquest drive image. going to try that today.

Ghost is the best one I have used it for years and its never let me down, you could also see if you can get your hands on Hard drive regenerator, I have used this on a few drives that where sounding like a bag of nails and it fixed them.


Flack .

i found a trial version of hard drive regenerator here, but i don't have a floppy drive to create the boot disk that is needed for xp.

http://www.ravios.com/hddregenerator.htm

Ghost works but it does not do a real image as DriveImage does. Well... maybe the newest version of Ghost does. I tested it about 2 years ago by defragging the hard drive, imaging it and then restoring the image. The HD fragmentation was way off. DriveImage restored the drive to the identical state that it had when I imaged it. That means one less step (could be a lengthy one) after one restores an image.

looks like my hdrive won't let the drive image software finish the backup without crashing. and i don't have a floppy drive to try hard drive regenerator. arrg. maybe i can get an external floppy?

Do you have a CD? Can you burn a boot CD?

When a hard drive starts going bad, there are several rules to follow. I probably should have posted this earlier.

1. Do not write ANYTHING to the hard drive.
2. Because you don't want to write anything, and since Windows insists on writing all sorts of things to the hard drive each time it boots up, this means that if the bad disk is your boot drive, you need to remove it from your system immediately and then attach it as a secondary drive so you can offload it.
3. Often, the drive is actually destroying itself with each read or write operation. Usually, there is a fleck of something in there that is causing a problem. Each time the fleck gets under the head, boom, another mini head crash and more material flying around. It generally reaches a point where it starts getting bad really fast.
4. If things progress to the point where you can't recover much stuff, but you still really need to recover stuff, visit this site: Ontrack. They make software, and also have data recovery services, designed to recover data from damaged drives. Their software is expensive, and their services are beyond expensive, but it beats losing the data.