How to transfer all programs installed in "about to die" harddisk

[thuynguyen]

My laptop hard disk (running XP)is about to die, I bought a new hard disk and managed to backup data files to CD.

The "about to die"'s hard disk needs to replace, and I would like to keep all programs installed to transfer to the new hard disk without reinstall them again (I lost some programs that I installed at "about to die"'s hard disk, if I install new XP on the new harddisk I will loose all programs that installed at old h/disk)

With laptop I can not install 2 hard disk as desktop so that I can not use Ghost to copy its image across.

Please advise how to transfer the whole image from the "about to die"'hard disk to new hard disk? Any tools available?

Thanks

 

[jpm121]

You can either copy the whole dang drive (Ghost) or you can just copy certain data files over. Migrating applications like the way you describe just doesn't work, because there are lots of registry entries, DLLs, and other components that programmers like to scatter all around your PC.

Later versions of Ghost allow copy over network, spanning CDs, and stuff like that. Maybe one of these options would work for you.

 

[thuynguyen]

Thanks for your advise. I never used the latest version of Ghost an not sure it may work by copying the whole image of the dang drive to spanned CDs or network then copy its image back to the new drive and still keep all previous programs settings. I may try it then.

 

[bcastner]

You can use inexpensive adapters to mount the old and new hard disk drives on the secondary IDE channel of a desktop machine.

Then you can transfer the entire partition over between drives.