Hi all

I have recently started to troubleshoot and repair PCs for freinds and work mates and there is one problem that turns up quite frequently: the PC's hard drive has become unbootable for whatever reason and the drive's on its way out. My question is: what is the best way to make an image of the data on the bad drive so that it can be transferd to a new drive?

A few ideas that I've had but am not sure about are:-

An ideal solution would be an external USB hard disk; just plug it in and make an image of the bad drive. The problem is the bad drive wont boot to windows and as far as I know a USB disk wont work from DOS (not recognised until windows loads) - correct me if I'm wrong.

Another solution would be to boot to windows from some kind of external hard drive and then make an image of the bad one. Is this possible?

The only other solution I can think of is to open the PC case and temporarily connect a second drive. I think this would work but I was hoping for an easier option. If I do have to do this is there any kind of IDE extension ribbon that can be used to enable the second drive to sit outside the pc case rather than hanging loosly inside - I dont want to physically bolt it in place just to make an image.

Any help greatly appreciated

Dan

You don't need to boot to Windoze to access DOS, actually the contrary is true. You would use a boot floppy disk to boot to DOS and access your external drive from there, assuming the BIOS will let you use the USB port without Windoze. As to whether you can then make an image, it would depend on how damaged the target drive is.

External devices are going to be slow. USB2/Firewire is pretty quick, but the general thing to do here is open the case up, insert another bootable drive, and configure the damaged one as a slave. Then you can copy the information across using whatever software you have (I think something like Norton Ghost should do this sort of thing)

I know I'm probably teaching my granny to suck eggs here, but do make sure it is genuinely unbootable before doing this. As Budfred stated, you can always jump into DOS and do the work from there. Also consider your other options including scandisk, system restore, FIXMBR etc.

I'm just starting in the business myself, but try to avoid the hard routes where possible - it is quite frightening when you consider that most people don't back up properly; not a problem in the old days of 100MB HDD, where we had 20 MB or so we needed to copy. Now, 100-200Gig HDD and no backups..............what have we let ourselves in for?:eek:

Thanks very much for your help Budfred & deddard

Do any of you know of any good sites that show how to connect a second drive and expain the Master and Slave concept?

Thanks again both
Dan

Here's a link to Seagate's help page. There's no images (as far as I know) but it does seem to cover a lot. I'll snoop around and see if I can find you some more:
installing HDD (http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/index.html)