Use of external drive as temporary main drive.

[Loose rivets]

For once, a simple question: A family member thinks he has a corrupt hard-drive. Could he use his external hard-drive as a temporary main/primary drive while he reformats the original?

[mixture]

No.

a/ Microsoft licensing doesn't permit it
b/ AFAIK it wont' work technically anyway

Different story in the business server world where expensive fibre storage arrays can do all sorts in magic.... but at home with a copy of Windows on your desktop, nope.

[mad_jock]

Aye you can.

Don't use microsoft though

Use some form of linux.

Make a live OS on a usb stick and set bios to boot from USB first.

Connect external drive and put usb stick in usb port and start.

When the thing has got going copy across to the external everything you want backed up.

Reformat the internal drive but make sure its FAT16 or 32

shut down and disconnect usb and external and set the bios to boot primary drive then DVD/CD then boot with setup disk in the CD/DVD. Use the setup to change the file system to your particular favorite

Install the OS then connect the external and copy the data back.

[aerobelly]

Kinda.

First requirement is to get all non-backed-up stuff off the borked drive onto flash memory. A "live" CD/DVD in the DVD drive will do that: I'd use Linux, but there may be Windows-ish "live" systems too.

After that it's a case of finding the installation discs and re-installing, then recovering personal files from the various backups.

If the cause of the initial corruption isn't known I would always fit a new disc drive (they're SO cheap now), and try to re-format and re-use the old one later.

In the past I've replaced disk drives due to "errors" that turned out to be a problem in the memory at the location that the disk drivers were loaded. So do a thorough memory test as well (google memtest 86).


mad_jocks's post has crossed with mine since starting typing this. We seem to agree that Linux is very useful at recovering Windows machines with disk problems. So useful that I avoid Windows entirely....


'b

[Saab Dastard]

Rivets,

Could he use his external hard-drive as a temporary main/primary drive while he reformats the original?

If the PC BIOS supports booting from a USB device AND the USB external disk is bootable, then yes. It is no different to booting from a USB flash memory stick.

The problem almost certainly is that his external disk is not bootable.

As others have stated, you can use some form of bootable device (USB or CD) to fire up the PC without touching the existing disk, attach the external disk and attempt to back up data.

Recovering data should be the first priority, but having achieved this (hopefully) it is then well worth running repairs using the HDD manufacturer's tools (download from their website), and / or from the MS setup disk.

If successful, one should then clone the existing disk using Ghost / Altiris etc. to a new hard disk, rather than re-use the old one, which will probably fail again. Even if some system files got corrupted, it is possible to overcome most file corruptions by doing a windows install\repair and one then has the old system working on a new hard disk, so no need to go through the process of re-installing all applications and settings.

This is definitely the process I would adopt (recovered one of my systems in just such a fashion recently).

MJ -

Reformat the internal drive but make sure its FAT16 or 32

Neither the reformat nor the FAT requirement are necessary - in fact I struggle to think of a reason for either. Much better to use the OS installation procedure to re-partition the disk (if required) and format as required.

shut down and disconnect usb and external and set the bios to boot primary drive then DVD/CD then boot with setup disk in the CD/DVD. Use the setup to change the file system to your particular favorite

I would recommend to set the BIOS boot sequence to Removable>CD>HDD.

SD

[mad_jock]

Its because some linux distros when they format a drive don't use a windows friendly file system when left on default.

Also as well a low level format will force the new installation to set up everything up fresh. As you say proberly not required.

But to be honest aerobelly makes a very good point that at current HD prices it would be stupid to not to put a new HD in.

[Loose rivets]

Thanks for the replies. I've mailed the link to this thread so that he can hopefully pick it up at work.

[sea oxen]

A good Christmas present is a 2 GB flash drive with a version of Ubuntu on it. Works on anything USB-bootable and is very easy for non-Linux people to understand.

Clonezilla is very nice to have too - it makes backing up trivial and reliable.

As others have said, make the dud disk a scratch disk after a new one has been installed and configured. On Windoze, a ground-up rebuild might actually be desirable.

SO