Advice needed

Hi,
after having continuous bad block disk errors in event viewer, I decided to purchase TI 10 Home retail version, in order to back up the whole drive to an external drive, then restore the drive image onto a new internal hard drive, however my computer refused to boot up the day before the software was delivered,
this seems a silly question to ask because TI has not yet been installed on my machine, is it possible to use the TI boot disk to boot into XP so that I can install TI and carry out my backups, any advice appreciated,
thanks.

 

The retail software CD itself should be a bootable one from which, without installing the software, you can do Backup, Recover, and Cloning.

If it is not the retail software CD you're getting, after you get the software, find a working computer to temporarily install it. Then look among the menu for Create Bootable Rescue Media and create the bootable Rescue CD.

Boot with this CD on your system and use its Backup feature to make the Image of your drive.

 

Hi Ralphie,
thanks for the prompt reply and help info, got nothing to lose so I will give it a go,
cheers.

 

Making an image of your damaged system will create a copy of your damaged system... unless you backup folders and files without the operating system.

Seems to me that you must work on repairing your XP,

Is it a Virus attack?
Is it the MBR?
Is it system file contamination?
Can you boot in Safe mode and run your anti-virus program?

 

I agree with mfabien. Doing a backup is not actually addressing the problem. I suggest you start by running chkdsk /r on all your suspect partitions.

F.

 

Making an Image of the system now will ensure that in the event your hard drive becomes worse, at least you will have a chance of recovering some files if they are not sitting on damaged sectors. And it certainly sounds like the hard drive is on its way out.
I have done Images of laptop drives that started to sound the "click of death" and have Restored those Images to new hard drives which were able to boot. Some files and programs were unretrievable but the majority were saved. So there is some value in making an Image even now.

 

Hi Ralphie,

taking a safe image now might actually be a good plan, but in my experience event log evidence alone is not normally an indication of imminent hardware failure. In fact at our head office we once had a development server running who's SCSI disk was logging hard drive event errors. The machine was so heavily used there was never a really good time to take it down and replace the disk. We left it running for another four years at which point the rest of the hardware had become obsolete. The disk never gave out.



F.

 

Yes, one can never tell what will happen, so I like to opt for the "better safe than sorry" route ... doesn't hurt to have some kind of insurance "up your sleeve".

 

Thanks for all the input folks, I had tried on numerous occasions to repair Xp from my recovery disk, to no avail, it just refused to boot up after repair,
I did as Ralphie suggested and TI created a full verified hard drive backup on my external hard drive, during the backup sequence I had to hit the ignore button when TI could not read a batch of bad disk sectors,
I was aware that this would probably happen, but at least it gives me a chance (as Ralphie said) to rescue data from the external drive at a later date,
My guess is that amongst other XP system data, data from the boot sequence was laid down on the bad sectors and could not be read, had the XP system data been laid down on good sectors of the hard disk then apart from some functional loss, XP would have continued to operate for some time, as suggested in a previous post,

my thanks to all,

Merlynn.

 

Let us know how it turns out when you get the new hard drive.

 

how did the chkdsk go ?

F.

 

Sorry f,
should have added some info as to your suggestions re: chkdsk, virus scan,etc,
When I began to have the bad block errors, they were single scattered errors, I ran chkdsk locate and repair and it reported ok, later the bad block errors became clusters of around twenty, evident by recorded times that they had occurred during the boot sequence, I must have ran half a dozen full system antivirus scans, spybot scans, adware scans, and attempts by chkdsk to locate and repair, in the following weeks, nothing found, problem remained,
The consensus of the many net forums I visited, was that the disk was failing, hence my purchase of the external drive and TI, which alas arrived too late,
My pc is now five years old, pretty good spec at the time of purchase, however as you know things have moved on at fast rate since then, have now decided to invest in a new model rather than throw money at the old one, that's why I am hoping the incomplete backup will now allow me to retrieve data from the old drive,

just like to add that so far I am very impressed by TI, and that this forum is a credit to all you dedicated users/posters,

thank you,
Merlynn.