I need help recovering my hard drive.

[Rekced]

I got a virus tonight and decided to recover my system with my external drive. The external drive contains a bootable clone of my C: drive that I made with Norton Ghost. I don't really know how to use Norton Ghost, so I just literally copied the entire C: drive there, made it a primary and bootable. I tried booting from the external drive but I got a blue screen. If it would have worked I would have made another clone back to C: and boot from that.

I thought this was going to be an easy process because I have been using this Hitachi software that I got 4-5 years ago and it has never let me down. This time it was able to start the copying process outside of Windows, but it always fails at around 8%. I am almost positive that both of these drives are in good working order, I just need a better copying/cloning software to use outside of Windows. One person I asked said that the clone I made is probably bad, but I am pretty confident that what is on the cloned USB drive is good.

The reason this is so hard is because I can't take the hard drive out of the laptop. It is very hard to get to to say the least!

Any suggestions on programs I should try?

Btw the OS is XP Pro.

 

[Mathias]

I'd recommend Ghost Solution Suite 2.5 with Symantec Ghost 11.5. With Ghost 11.5 it's possible to make a Ghost boot cd and clone your drive/make an image of another drive. Try it out. It's pretty easy-to-use.

If you need any help, feel free to ask.

 

[KurrentEweser]

I use Acronis True Image. I've never used Norton Ghost so I can't tell you which is better. I image my drive before every major program installation.

Images are similar compressed ISO files. Acronis images are mountable to drive letters so you can pull data from them without having to restore them. I keep several images of my C: drive as backup. Every once in a while I'll restore those images to keep them up to date.

What you should have done was image your drive rather than cloning it to another drive.

 

[Rekced]

I use Acronis True Image. I've never used Norton Ghost so I can't tell you which is better. I image my drive before every major program installation.

Images are similar compressed ISO files. Acronis images are mountable to drive letters so you can pull data from them without having to restore them. I keep several images of my C: drive as backup. Every once in a while I'll restore those images to keep them up to date.

What you should have done was image your drive rather than cloning it to another drive.

Well, the mistake was made and the lesson is being learned. Are there ANY programs that would allow me to do this?

 

[KurrentEweser]

Well, the mistake was made and the lesson is being learned. Are there ANY programs that would allow me to do this?

With an Acronis or Norton Ghost boot CD should be able to clone your external bootable drive back to the original partition. Just maybe those blue screens will go away.