Hard Drive is Dead

My hard drive died and I am being sent a replacement. It should be nearly the same as before. Is there any reason I can't use the last image I made before the death of my HD to bring it back to life? Your advice is appreciated

 

If it's the same drdive, then you probably won't have an issue. If it's slightly diff in size or type, then at least do a manual restore with your restore. It's likely that windows will have the drivers for the disk.

This is no guarrantee; jsut playing the odds. At worst, you'll need to, after you restore, boot he windows CD and do a repair that let's you F6 a new driver, if one is needed. So go ahead and restore. Since you have the backup file, you can always start again. But I'm betting you won't have to.
Note that the diff harddisk being used as the system disk might trigger a need to reactivate windows. If so, just call them up and tell them you got a new disk. No biggee, jsut a slight inconvenience.

Oh, also realize that whatever prob killed your harddrive might have been scrambling things here an there for a while now. If so, those scrambles will be in the recent backups.

 

Just put the new drive in place connect and jumper as the old one was.
Boot from the Rescue CD and you are nearly finished. If the replacement is the same size as the old one check the box for the whole disk and all the boxes will also be selected. If the replacement is a different size select each partition in turn to enable resizing as you go. Finish with the MBR box and press commit and you will be up and running after removing the CD and re booting.
After the first re-boot Windows will say that new hardware has been found and you will need to re-boot for it to work properly. So another re-boot and you are done.

Just replacing a hard drive will not call for a re- activation. It scores very low on the re-activation scale.

Xpilot

 

Thanks very much for your replies. I am a bit foggy on a couple of the terms you have used. First "rescue CD"...do you mean the image? I ask because I store mine on an XHD and to recover I would simply refer to that image to use when its called for by the Acronis program. Second you refer to a "manual restore" I only know one way to restore/recover....am I missing something? I really like the way my computer is set up and I hope I can pull this off. I do have several programs I have accumulated over the years and would have trouble finding and updating them if I had to start from scratch. Thanks again, gentlemen.

 

I think I've seen this before on the forum but will ask just to be sure. Does the resizing during restore allow for a smaller partition size than the original size of the imaged partition, assuming of course that the original partition had unused space?

Thanks.

Doug

 

Yes, it does.

 

Usually, a replacement drive supplied by the drive manufacturer is the same size as the original.

Xpilot has listed exactly what you need to do. To feel a little more comfortable in these instructions, you could invest a little more time by reading my restore guide listed on line 2 of my signature.

Boot from the Rescue CD and no pre-drive preparation needed. The replacement of a system drive is best accomplished when booted from the Rescue CD.

The Rescue CD (a.k.a. "recovery cd") can be created after TrueImage is installed.
Open TrueImage and select Tools/Create Bootable Rescue CD and follow the instructions. A flashdrive can also be created to use instead of the CD version.

Generally speaking all forum members recommended:

1. User should create a TI Rescue CD as one of their first functions when TrueImage is first installed.

2. Next is to perform some backups and restores (testing) using the Rescue CD so the user knows the CD will function correctly when a critical need occurs. (All too often the need occurs and the user has never created or tested their Rescue CD.)

3. All backup image archives should be validated (both using Windows & the Rescue CD) until you are comfortable that the backups are problem free.​

 

Thanks again, gentlemen for your good advice. Just to sort of finish this thread, I do have a TI rescue disk I just get a bit mired in the terminology sometimes. I also have the disk director V10. Good stuff indeed. I don't have anything from the manufacturer but do have a winxp pro installation disk. I plan to do a full install when the drive arrives and then image into my previous state using a *.tib file with the rescure disk. I probably will run into some moderate driver problems but it will be educational and I hope I can fight my way through it. Again thanks, you really do provide a good service to those of us in need.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by this, "and then image into my previous state using a *.tib file with the rescure disk." But if you mean restoring the Image you talked about in your first post, then there is no need to do what you said here, "I plan to do a full install when the drive arrives ..." as the restore process will need to wipe out what you have on the new drive.

Just boot with the True Image Rescue CD and use the Recovery feature.

 

If your .tib file was a "my computer" backup that is an image of the whole of your drive there is no need to re-install anything.
You just replace the drive and boot from the recovery CD, find your backup .tib and run the restore. You then will be back to the same set up as the computer was at the time the original backup was made.

If you did not make a full backup in the first place then it is a different problem altogether.

I don't recall reading where you have stored your backup image and whether it can be found when booted from the recovery CD. You did make a recovery CD as well a a backup .tib I hope.

Xpilot

 

Well I guess I still don't fully understand. If the HD arrives with nothing on it how does it get the MBR if you don't install a copy of windows. Does the rescue disk enter this on the first sector of the drive and then go on to restore the rest of the OS? Does the motherboard contain the BIOS? I'm sorry I am taking up so much of your time...perhaps you would rather refer me to something printed that I could read that would answer some of these questions.

 

The rescue disk will take care of it. Pre loading windows or formatting the disk before doing a full disk restore has absolutely no benefits and will only waste time because ATI is going to overwrite whatever is on the disk anyhow. Read the guide GroverH pointed you to. Sometimes reading instructions is very hellpful.