Transfer old hard drive contents & windows to new hard drive

Computer Hardware
#1

My mother recently had her computer crash on her, she had a coworker, look at the hard drive to see if the contents could be saved, all the contents are still on the hard drive, but she was told she should get a new hard drive. It was an 80 Gb hard drive.

how should my mom & I go about transferring all the contents from the old 80 GB hard drive to a new one? the old one has died, it had all files etc & software as well as windows XP home edition. It had crashed after we tried to install service pack 3. I am not sure if service pack 3 is on there or service pack 2.

what file format should the new hard drive be? NTFS? we want to copy the old hard drive contents onto the new one & put it back into the PC & get the PC up & running.

we were going to upgrade this existing PC with more ram etc as well, but if this is not economical, what other options should we consider?

#2

If the old hard drive has truly died you will not be able to recover the old files.
However if it just will not boot there is hope.
When you purchase a new drive go to the manufacturer’s web site and down load their file transfer software for this purpose. Seagate/Maxtor has very good free software available for this as do many others.
Install the software and follow the instructions.
I assume you have tried getting into safe mode and tried a previous restore point?

#3

How can she Install the software if her HDD won’t boot into windows???

#4

Has “Last known good configuration” or “Safe Mode” been tried to see if it’'ll boot? You might also try a repair install or repair using recovery console using Windows install CD if it still won’t boot.

Just transferring contents of old drive to new one will likely transfer the problems along with it if there are problems on the old drive. You likely need to fix the problems first to be able to transfer everything and have it work properly. Repair install or Repair using Recovery Console are probably best solution to try to fix problems.

#5

You’re getting good advice. I would try to recover the functionality of the OS first. Perhaps this has been tried, but it doesn’t sound like it has.

What does the computer do when you attempt to start it ?

#6

[QUOTE=G_Ivan Awfulitch;2310050]How can she Install the software if her HDD won’t boot into windows???[/QUOTE]

The software can be run from cd.