Andrew,
Yes - that was my need too - almost the same level of problem, just a simple issue that stopped Win from booting.
99% of the data was on an external NAS which is properly backed up every day, so it was really more a case of the OS and software, mail, web browsing, networking and office productivity stuff etc but the configuration and loading of tables of tooling and cutting information for some of the software was considerable and since most of this wasnt really documented as it evolves over time - I would be discovering settings and missing tool data in the CAD/CAM software for months before I got it all working the way I want it again.
Given the frequency that poeple have to reconfigure these days - it really is high time that the software companies made all their configuration settings transportable and able to be better separated from the OS into the Data - some do it but most dont do it properly if at all.
Plus disabling all the automatic updating etc and turning off all the silly help and automatic correction settings in all the "productivity" software - a real pet hate of mine.
Pretty sure you can now get the same external USB to SATA/IDE. . . hardware adapters with all the cables and power connectors now for under $10
Makes it so easy to deal with new and old internal HDDs for this sort of issue.
And while the PC in question is unbootable and uneseable you can use any old laptop to do it all without needing any extra HDD space
Rally
Quote:
Originally Posted by AndrewJ
Gday Rally
In my case, i had backups of all my data, but couldnt boot the drive.
After ages, i finally found a bad cluster on the HDD and it was right where NTUSER.dat was :-), but no recovery apps would work as the recovery disk couldnt use the registry to find the required data.
As such, my external backups didnt help, and i had to rebuild the lot ( incl all the bleedin patches )
Just want to avoid that in future.
I have dual 1TB backup drives, but just need a way to get a "bootable" image of the W2K onto them.
As mentioned, i can do it all manually by creating a new disk with a newly partitoned disk + mbr, then simply copying the files ( vs raw sectors) offline using the W7 box, but its a pain.
Andrew
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