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Is there a way i can replace Master harddrive...

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I ran into a problem with harddrive last week...now it is working fine but i would like to replace it...i don't have any CD or copy of windows Xp operating system...is there a way to copy just the operating system software and reload it to the New Disk harddrive.

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by cmiller5400

Use an imaging program such as Norton Ghost, or Acronis TrueImage.

by formerly callpete.com

Norton Ghost will do the trick. A little pricey for a utility you should need ONCE.

If you get the lastest UBCD ISO from http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
There is a hard drive utility similar to "Norton Ghost" that you can use to copy from the old master drive to the new slave drive. When you finish, you SHOULD be able to make the new drive "master" and remove the old drive. This SHOULD work.

If you are a little more gutsy, you can "slave" in your new hard drive, and boot to a linux "live" cd (almost any current flavor), and probably from within a linux shell inside UBCD. If the drives are the same model/size you should be able to type dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=1m
This command stands for "device dump"
and will do a raw read from the hda device "hard drive a" and output it to the hdb "hard drive b" file. bs is block size. If the new drive is larger, it MAY work, but I wouldn't count on it.

For more details of the syntax, see
http://www.softpanorama.org/Tools/dd.shtml

I hope this helps.

by ic-it

Newer drives usually (unless OEM) have a Drive Utility CD that will create a clone of the old drive to the new drive.

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