My relatives have Vista Premium installed, but now it won’t load due to most definitely a physical error with a small part of the hard drive.
Booting would start normally but won’t go beyond a certain point. The drive would make a noise and Windows would try running something to recover, but it won’t help. Safe Mode and Last Known Good Configuration would behave the same.
Since it’s a long travel, I would like to try and fix it in a single trip. What I hope to do is copy everything to a new drive + fix the corrupted files.
I can boot the PC from another drive. I am not very familiar with Vista’s tools, but in any case I also have Partition Magic 8 (possibly Norton Ghost 10 too, if needed) and the Hitachi’s Drive Fitness Test utility for the culprit hard drive. It would even probably be cheaper buying another retail utility, than driving over again?
There should be enough good space on the bad drive to fix it temporarily, marking out the bad sectors, but I wish to also replace the drive in order to avoid future issues.
My best idea is: fix the drive (mark bad sectors) with Hitachi’s utility or chkdsk, then fix Vista with Startup Repair from Vista’s disk, and lastly clone the HD with Partition Magic.
My difficulties:
Would the above work best?
Is Vista’s Startup Repair the same as XP’s repair?
I would like it to salvage as much data as possible, but especially to let me know what files from which folders got corrupted, so that I know what needs fixing ? I think Hitachi’s Drive Fitness does neither. Which bad-sector/rescue utility should I use and how do I get the list of damaged files?
I’m afraid that after fixing the drive I would have no way of knowing which files (beside Vista’s) were harmed, so I can’t play trial and error here.
If necessary, is there any software that does all that better?
Thanks in advance for any ideas!