Saving a dying drive: best practices?

[spacefiddle]

I have an aging box with IDE drives (eek, yes, i know) and the primary is failing: that gawdawful *whack* the head keeps making onto the platter is my first clue. I've ordered a replacement already with a larger capacity, but: what next?

The failing drive has this machine's OS on it and a ton of apps i'd rather not reinstall. in some cases i probably *cannot* reinstall as the SNs or even the original CDs themselves are MIA. So ideally, i would like to clone the old drive onto the new larger drive, set the new drive in place as the primary, and happily boot from there.

I was thinking the best way to do this would be

1. Attach the new replacement blank drive as a secondary in the box
2. Boot into a linux live CD of some flavour
3. Do something here that clones old -> new
4. Profit!

As you can see, step 3 is missing some key details. Any advice would be appreciated. If someone has a "here, use this dd one liner command to stream one hard drive to another" that would totally rock.

 

[apocalyp5e]

Get the hiren boot cd

1.First scan your drive and fix any bad sectors
2. connect the new drive
3.boot from cd again and run ghost .....clone from old to new drive
4. boot from new drive
5. hope all is alive

sometimes while ghosting, it doesn't make the partition active. There are tools on that cd to do it all.

Good Luck

 

[spacefiddle]

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hiren.thanki/bootcd.html

you mean that?

i don't have norton ghost, however - anyone have a FOSS solution?

Edit: Garr, i see it's on the disk. I only read the partition section, harhar.
However, there is no longer a download link to the CD on Hiren's page due to legality issues: so where can i get something that will work?

Thanks again!

 

[apocalyp5e]

That is the page of the guys who make the cd but they don't offer the download there. The cd can be found on the net. If you need help finding it I will help. The cd image is downloaded as an ISO. Burn it using Nero or any application that will write an image to a cd.
Norton ghost and any other tools you need is on the hiren cd

check your PM

 

[spacefiddle]

Thanks, i found a version of it. Yay Ktorrent.