A customer brought in a Gateway laptop complaining that it was behaving erratically – sometimes would not boot at all, sometimes a message appears indicating OS not found, sometimes boot normally. I suspected hard drive issues and after running chkdsk /f I attempted to create an image of the C drive with Norton Ghost 12 – but the image creation failed. A message appeared saying the the errors found on the drive precluded the creation of a successful image. I was able to create an image of the recovery partition, however, and also created a DVD with the apps and drivers. But apparently the OS recovery cannot happen without the OS running, and there does not seem to be an app to create a Recovery CD/DVD for the OS (Vista Home Premium.) Norton did allow me to create an image of the C drive if I checked off ‘ignore bad sectors during copying,’ but I don’t know how valid that image would be when restored on a new HDD. So, to make a long story short, I’d like to try to clone the old hard drive onto a new one, while the old drive is still alive. Norton has a feature to clone a drive but I’m not sure how to use it. So how would you proceed? Your help, as always, is invaluable and very much appreciated.
