I was wandering around the Microsoft site looking for information on making an image backup of a hard drive partition (specifically, C: where Windows is located (on most computers). My boot hard drive is failing on my desktop. Spinrite (www.grc.com) has rescued it a couple of times, but that’s not really a solution…
The problem is that restoring an image to a different hard drive doesn’t always work with Windows XP, even before the Windows Genuine Advantage validation issues that might occur.
I know how to make the image backup (I normally use Partition Magic 
to back up the image. This is great normally.
My new drive is a 200GB Seagate, with which I’ve had pretty good luck. My current preferences, in order by brand, are Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital. The drive I’m replacing is also WD and is only a couple years old (it’s a 200 GB, so you know it’s not very old), so WD may drop off my preferred list now.
Unfortunately, I think I bought this 200 GB Western Digital drive during the time that the drive manufacturers were trying to force us to go to 1 year warranties. I remember a $14.95 signup form for an extended warranty. I don’t think I did it, but I’ve got a nagging doubt. Of course, I can’t do without the drive..
Fortunately, while I was writing this article, I remembered that many drive manufacturers include “drive migration software” with their retail-packaged hard drives.
This is my chance to try that drive migration software in the Seagate package. .
[originally posted in 2006 - wow, drives sure were small then <grin>]
and