HD Clone or Fresh Install?

[Pepper90]

I am moving my XP system to a larger HD and recently had some viruses to clean out. There is a report that something, perhaps virus damage, changed the OS drive from NTFS to RAW from running the Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostic program. The Acronis disk Director management program notes it as "Not Formatted". And the Western Digital version of Acronis True Image notes "Not Formatted".

On the other hand Diskeeper defragmenting profram and XP's "My Computer" properties both report NTFS.

The drive is working fine and appears to be clean of threats when checked on multiple times with several virus and malware programs.

Would a repair install fix the possibility of a RAW file system?

That being the case with the potential that the original drive is a RAW file system (depending on which reporting is correct), when moving to the new larger drive if I format the new drive as NTFS and try a cloning, will it end up as RAW?

Is it better to bite the bullet and do a fresh install on the new drive? There are 5 years of history on the drive, so reinstalling and tweaking all the programs will be quite an undertaking.

 

[ksiemb]

I am moving my XP system to a larger HD and recently had some viruses to clean out. There is a report that something, perhaps virus damage, changed the OS drive from NTFS to RAW from running the Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostic program. The Acronis disk Director management program notes it as "Not Formatted". And the Western Digital version of Acronis True Image notes "Not Formatted".

On the other hand Diskeeper defragmenting profram and XP's "My Computer" properties both report NTFS.

The drive is working fine and appears to be clean of threats when checked on multiple times with several virus and malware programs.

Would a repair install fix the possibility of a RAW file system?

That being the case with the potential that the original drive is a RAW file system (depending on which reporting is correct), when moving to the new larger drive if I format the new drive as NTFS and try a cloning, will it end up as RAW?

Is it better to bite the bullet and do a fresh install on the new drive? There are 5 years of history on the drive, so reinstalling and tweaking all the programs will be quite an undertaking.

What does Disk Management report the file system as ? Repair-install is not going to fix the file system. Run a chkdsk on the drive ?

 

[Mu33rto]

I won't clone any system unless its a fresh install. Do a fresh install it only takes 30-45 mins. Also the system will be faster and feel like new again.. Make sure to install the antivirus before installing the old hdd as a slave.

 

[Pepper90]

Disk Managements says it's a healthy NTFS drive but going to the tools and trying to run a check at the next boot says that Autochk will not run on RAW drive.

So would running a repair install possibly solve that?

It's not reinstalling XP that is meeting with resistance, but all the other programs, so of which require getting new pass codes from the vendors. Somehow they have one time install codes and they will not reinstall with out their intervention.

 

[ksiemb]

Disk Managements says it's a healthy NTFS drive but going to the tools and trying to run a check at the next boot says that Autochk will not run on RAW drive.

So would running a repair install possibly solve that?

It's not reinstalling XP that is meeting with resistance, but all the other programs, so of which require getting new pass codes from the vendors. Somehow they have one time install codes and they will not reinstall with out their intervention.

The partition or partitions on that drive have been corrupted by whatever nasty infection you mentioned you started out with. Partition recovery APP may bail you out, but The safe thing to do is fresh install your OS on the new hard drive. Move your personal files over to new drive. Bite the bullet & reinstall software. PS: Clean scans, even if you run multiple virus products is not a guarantee you are infection free.

 

[Pepper90]

I had my secondary drive go south and several programs referred to it as the backup drive.
As soon as I removed the failed drive and rerouted the backup references the OS appeared to be working fine with the exception of being called RAW.
Could that have been the cause of the file structure corruption?

 

[Mu33rto]

With windows any thing is possible. But more likely is that a virus corrupted the filesystem.

http://www.sparkmylife.com/find-and-backup-serials-license-keys-of-installed-software-on-windows-machine.html

 

[Pepper90]

Thanks all.