Reinstate Windows

[GMan]

Hello,

I am paranoid about data backup and so copy all files and folders onto an external hard drive. Unluckily for me when my main hard drive died I found that I couldnt boot off my external hard drive. No problem I thought, I will just copy the windows file to my new hard drive (on which I re-installed WIN XP Pro) rename it, then change my boot.ini file to reflect the name of the new folder. I nshort this didnt work. I got t othe old log-in screen, it accepted my username and password, and then everythin gstarted to fail. it cold nt fid a couple of dll files and I had a few memort referencing errors. After that I didnt realy have anything I needed. Does anyone have any ideas why?

Thanks,

geoff

[homecomputeraid]

Hi GMan,

Straight file copying changes the paths to files, and changes some data Windows uses to know what's where. You can't just 'move' your OS from disk to disk.

Sounds like what you'd really like is to have a backup image of your hard drive stored on another drive. You can use a utility like Norton Ghost, or Norton GoBack. I've used and can vouch for Ghost. I haven't used GoBack.

If you use a backup product of some kind, you can restore from it, and the PC will be like it was before. The danger in that is restoring a corrupt OS. If you have a hardware failure that doesn't affect the data, you're ok to restore the image to a new harddrive. If you have OS problems, I'd rebuild the OS and applications from scratch, and restore only the data files from the image.

Hope this answers your question.

[GMan]

Hi,

That's probably what I should have done, unfortunately I didnt! I dont fancy installing all my prgrams and tweaking my system for hours again. Still if that's what i gotta do... Anyone able to save me?