My C: drive recently started giving me HD521-2W error when I ran "PC Doctor 5 for Windows" diagnostic multiple times in the past few weeks.
I created backup images of both the partitions on this 320 GB HD ( Active partition named "HP_Pavilion" and Primary partition named "HP_Recovery") onto an external USB drive using Macrium Free edition.
I later took PC to a PC repair shop and installed a new 320 GB WD hard drive. However, he DID NOT create 2 partitions as the old drive BUT he made this new drive bootable and downloaded all the necessary drivers.
My questions are :
# 1 ) Is there a tool or an utility I can use to download all the drivers CURRENTLY installed on the old hard drive onto a CD/DVD for later Clean Install of XP?
# 2) How can I make this new hard drive look exactly like the old drive - I mean, it must have 2 partitions using Macrium backups images I already created ?
I hope, I explained this situation to best of my knowldge and created least amount of confusion.
There are tools to do this however if you just made one image with macrium of the entire drive, it would be a very easy task.
1 Simply install the new drive.
2 Restore the image.
Done.
Here is the tool however it would be much better to clean install windows and use up to date drivers rather than the old ones that came with the system.
As crjdriver says, you should be able to restore the image to the new drive.
The image will have all the updates that were performed up to when when it was made, so if the image is only a few weks old, you would only need to do updates that have came out since you made the inage.
A clean install will require you to do all the updates that have came out since you got your XP disk. More importantly, if your disk is an OEM, the image will not have all the junk you have removed.
It is not going to be that easy. I think he made images of each partition instead of making one image of the disk. He can restore each image however there is no master boot record to restore. He will need to rebuild the mbr along with the restore.
Thanks a LOT for your feedback. Thanks a LOT crjdriver for that tool.
I am planning to make dvd/cd backup of the drivers currently installed on my XP machine if the disaster strikes again in the future. I am hoping that this tool will also help me in downloading the latest versions for the drivers.
I had NO choice but to prepare 2 images - one for Active and one for Primary partition. The old drive had these two partitions when I bought it from HP. I never received any XP DVD/CD from HP either. They instructed me to make Recovery DVDs - which I did.
I am planning to use this new 320 GB drive exact replica of the old drive which is giving HD521-2W error. Right now, I can boot from the new drive and the drivers have been installed.
I am NOT quite sure if restore operation of the image of the Active partion onto the new drive will wipre out the MBR on the new drive. If that happens, I do know how to create/restore MBR during the restore operation.
I do not understand why you could not make an image of the whole drive. I do this all the time with multiple partitions on the drive.
Next if you have already made the recovery disks, you really do not need the recovery partition any longer. It might be nice to have however you have the recovery disks.
To rebuild the boot files, you need a real xp CD not a recovery type CD.
Boot with the xp CD and do the following;
1. Boot your computer with the Windows XP CD. When prompted to Setup or Repair, choose Repair. In the Recovery Console, enter the following commands:
2. FIXBOOT, answer Yes
3. CD \
4. ATTRIB -H NTLDR
5. ATTRIB -S NTLDR
6. ATTRIB -R NTLDR
7. ATTRIB -H NTDETECT.COM
8. ATTRIB -S NTDETECT.COM
9. ATTRIB -R NTDETECT.COM
10. COPY X:\I386\NTLDR C:\
11. COPY X:\I386\NTDETECT.COM C:\
In the last two commands, X is the letter of your CD drive.
The ONLY reason I did not make the image of the entire old drive (let us call it C drive) is because there are 2 partitions. One is NTFS and other is FAT32 and I was NOT sure if it will create any problem if I try to restore the image later. Now, I have created an image of the entire old drive "C" using Macrium Reflect.
Yes, I do have recovery DVDs but I wanted to keep this partition on the new drive(let us call it D drive) in case I loose DVDs or something unforeseen happens with DVDs. That's all.
I do NOT have XP cd/dvd.
So, the facts are : 1) I have no XP cd/dvd 2) I have created complete 1 image of drive C 3) new drive D is bootable but has ONLY one NTFS partition 4) I hav eONLY 2 HP recovery dvds - hopefully, they will come to my resue when needed
Q 1) How can I create 2 partitions on D drive - 1 NTFS and other FAT32
Q 2) Can I just restore new image of drive C onto drive D WITHOUT screwing boot record or MBR , so that I have HP Recovery data on drive D.
I never did this before and I do have very limited hardware knowledge.
I want to do this under your or some expert like yours guidance. :up:
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