Help with PC recovery: Moving Win 7 to another HHD

[njiska]

Hey guys, I know there are some pretty technical people on here, so i could use some advice if any one can offer it. Long story short I have a failing harddrive that is housing my current Win 7 install and reinstalling to a new drive is out of the question for three reasons:

- No access to Win 7 install media
- Original key used was a VLK I got from college
- VLKs are not stored locally so tools like Magic Jelly Beans can't recover it.

Over the weekend I did some tests with Spinrite and found that while most of the data is good (only 6 bad sectors), the drive's read/write latency was ridiculously high. It's very clearly on it's way out. Reviewing my options, I believe the best option I have is to copy the data to another drive. Here's what I've done so far:

sdd: 500 GB Win 7 drive
sde: 1TB NTFS drive

- Shrunk the 1 TB parition down to a smaller size and moved ti to the end of the drive.
- Created a 100 MB Partition at offset 2048
- Created a partition between that and the previous partition that is exactly the size of my win7 partition
- Backed up partition table of sde
- Backed up the MBR of sdd with

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dd if=/dev/sdd of=~/mbr.bak bs=512 count=1

- Restored first 446 bytes (so to preserve the partition table on sde) with

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dd if=~/mbr.bak of=/dev/sde bs=446 count=1

- Copied Windows Reserved Partition

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dd if=/dev/sdd1 of=/dev/sde2

- Copied OS parition

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dd if=/dev/sdd2 of=/dev/sde3

- Restarted and edited BIOS to boot of the correct drive
- Windows Starts to boot, crashes and restarts
- Selected "Repair My Computer" from Windows boot options.
- Detected error with starup information for boot loader. Automatically corrected. This updated the record to point to the correct HDD volume
- Windows now starts and hangs on the "Starting Windows..." screen.

I'm not really sure where to go from here. Since I can boot into anything I believe I copied the MBR correctly. I also made sure that the reserved partition started at offset 2048 as windows expects. The boot table was updated successfully, so I'm kinda stuck as to what's wrong now.

[ED-057]

Can you make a straight sector copy of the entire old drive to the new drive? Then maybe resize/add partitions and whatnot after booting from the new drive?

[njiska]

Sure, that's definitely an option as I have lots of space/drives to work with. The only downside is that it'll be yet more time. Probably close to 15 hours of operations. I'm hoping I can salvage this current state first.

[Ed Oscuro]

Did you try another hard drive cloning tool, like Acronis True Image (hosted by WDC)? I recall using something like that when I cloned a laptop hard drive a couple years ago, although I wasn't dealing with a failing drive. Not sure what to say since it sounds like your key was something that wasn't meant to be kept by the user. If you do have the key written down somewhere, ask around for somebody who has the appropriate install media (it wouldn't be me, since my copy is Ultimate).

[njiska]

Did you try another hard drive cloning tool, like Acronis True Image (hosted by WDC)? I recall using something like that when I cloned a laptop hard drive a couple years ago, although I wasn't dealing with a failing drive. Not sure what to say since it sounds like your key was something that wasn't meant to be kept by the user. If you do have the key written down somewhere, ask around for somebody who has the appropriate install media (it wouldn't be me, since my copy is Ultimate).

I can find the media if need be, that's not a problem. The key was a Volume License Key that I obtained legitimately from a college that I no longer have associations with, so I can't get it again. I should have written it down, but did not. VLKs are generally used by large corporations with many installs and are not meant to be retrievable by an end user, that's why they aren't stored locally unlike retail keys. May have just got a line on the key though.

As for Acronis, I don't know if it will do what I want at this point, but I'm pretty certain I can accomplish what I need with dd and it's no cost.

[shmuppyLove]

You shouldn't need to retrieve the key. The license will be tied to the SLIC information stored in the computer's BIOS, not on the hard drive. So as long as you can successfully clone the system partition, you should be good to go.

True Image is a good one to try, or this one from Easeus:

http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/home-edition/

I've always had good success with Easeus' tools, and they're free!