windows 7 transfer

[hamlet]

hi guys

So, long story short, I have a friend who practically beat his hard drive to failing in his laptop. The laptop reminds me that the harddrive is failing every time i turn on the laptop. After doing a a factory restore as instructed by the customer support team, i do have the laptop working better then it was but the harddrive is still giving failure warnings. I have went out and got a new harddrive for the computer. I was told by support that i could copy the windows file on to a disk so i can put it on the new harddrive without buying a new copy of windows since i have my key already. however, we did not discuss how because the recovery process takes hours. and all though "Jessica" was trying to be friendly and patient, you could hear the frustration in her voice when i had a hard time understanding her accent. so if any of you know how or what files to copy over to put my windows copy on a disk, and how big of a disk i need, I would greatly appreciate the help.
Thanks

 

[carnageX]

Or you could just clone the entire drive over to the new drive, as long it would last long enough for the clone to work.

Clonezilla - About

My preferred method is to create an image of the drive, save the image onto an external HDD (or a spare HDD), and then from that image, "restore" the image onto the new HDD. Should work fine and will be exactly how it was previously.

Is the new HDD the same size or larger than the old drive?

If you do go for the clone-route, then after you clone it onto the new HDD, then I would suggest you run the following from CMD after you boot for the first time into the new windows install:

Open CMD as Admin, and type in the following:
chkdsk c: /B

What the /B flag does (only available on Vista/7/8) is it clears the "bad sectors" list, and then re-scans the drive to search / mark off bad sectors (like the /R flag does). M$ recommends you perform this operation after you clone an HDD.

 

[strollin]

If the hard drive is failing and has bad sectors or other errors then an image backup or clone operation may fail due to those errors. Does the factory restore have the option of creating restore disks? If so, you could try that option if the clone operation fails. Another option is to see if you can order restore disks from the laptop mfr.