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I mostly use Arch Linux, but I have an older Windows XP computer that recently has had some blocks go bad on the C drive that has the OS and a lot the program files and settings. The drive still boots, but VERY slowly and gives a lot of weird errors because of the bad blocks. I think the bad blocks are not affecting anything critical because once it eventually boots up, it works.

I would like to copy the contents of the drive off the deteriorating HD onto a new one, but am not sure of the procedure to do this and maintain the drive's bootability. What is a reliable process for making the transplant?

Tyler Durden
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1 Answers1

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There is no guaranteed reliable way.

I assume you are running the 32-bit version of XP. Use ddrescue to clone your source to a target that has at least the size of the source drive. Do not exceed 2TB as you won't be able to manage the amount of storage beyond the 2TB barrier with the old school partition table that XP 32-bit supports.

Make sure that the target is emulating sectors with a size of 512 bytes. This is the mode your source disk is operating.

Select the new drive as the boot device in your BIOS. Upon reboot with the new drive XP could ask for activation if this replacement is pushing the modification counter of XP beyond the reactivation barrier. You would then need to check with Microsoft.

r2d3
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