replacing failed hard drive? Won't boot up

[bwebster]

Hi. So I had a fatal HDD issue. Was trying to upgrade to Vista, apparently the Vista disk had a bad sector (scratch?) Bought a new drive, partitioned it, formatted it and ran the Windows XP recovery to recreate my C drive (even though it formatted with a different drive letter) It is never as simple as running recover and dropping the new drive in.... Guess there were some things I missed...

Not sure if I can get anything else off the old drive, it got stuck between XP and the Vista upgrade I was trying to do. I did do a full backup before trying the upgrade, so I still have that going for me... Now it won't run in either, crashes in Vista and I can't 'roll back' to xp, new drive gives me a non system disk error. Would like to just get the new drive with old XP to run and forget the vista upgrade... Don't have full XP install disk any more, this desktop came preloaded... Help!

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, bwebster.

Not having an installation disk or a recovery/repair disk, or at least an OEM one is indeed a problem. Windows XP's support was discontinued more than 2 years ago and I don't know if you'd be able to get what you need from Microsoft's customer support, but you could still give it a try. Other than that you could take a look at that link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/310994 (but this requires really obsolete technology - a floppy disk drive).
It's a good thing that you were able to backup your data.

I guess that if your computer came with an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) Windows XP, you could contact the customer support of the computer manufacturer and ask for help.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD

 

[bwebster]

I was able to find an old XP Pro install CD. tried running it under repair XP (I ran the recovery from my backup file so it looks like the "old" HDD from 10 Sep 16, but is not recognized as the C: (boot) drive (non system disk error)) but it does not 'see' the new drive. Do I have to do a full install and then run recovery from my backup file? Can it be that simple? Or am I missing a (bunch of) step(s)?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

What method did you use to backup your data? What kind of recovery and backup file are you talking about here? I was under the impression that you meant personal data when you've mentioned that you've backed it up beforehand. Was it a system image?

Installing Windows XP from scratch on the new drive might be a start. After that depending on the backup you did and on the Windows version, you might be able to restore it. Check this out: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/309340

 

[bwebster]

What method did you use to backup your data? What kind of recovery and backup file are you talking about here? I was under the impression that you meant personal data when you've mentioned that you've backed it up beforehand. Was it a system image?

Installing Windows XP from scratch on the new drive might be a start. After that depending on the backup you did and on the Windows version, you might be able to restore it. Check this out: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/309340

I used the Windows "backup" under Accessories / System tools (NTbackup?) Believe it is saved as a .bkf file? Did entire C:\ drive..... Not sure if that was an image but...... Restore wizard seems familiar....

 

[Boogieman_WD]

I see. In this case, since you already have the backup and you have nothing to lose, you can go ahead and give it a try (although I'm not 100% that it would work as we want it to work). If the Windows XP version is the exact same one, you should be able to use the same tool and instead of selecting "backup", select "restore", from there choose the correct .bkf file and try to restore it, to see if everything will go as planned.
You should also be able to restore a .bkf file on newer version of Windows as well: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4220