Here's the situation. A friend's hard disk finally decided to die for no apparent reason.

It gives the message "Drive 0 on the primary EIDE controller is operating outside of normal specifications"
It then advises to back up any data. Only problem is, it refuses to boot to windows. I did some homework on the error message and found that it means that the HD is dying. I opened the box and listened, sure enough it's whining in the typical screwed-HD fashion. So, my question is this; I'd like to attempt to transfer the contents of his disc over to a blank spare of mine, but I'm running into some problems of my own with it.

I downloaded DriveClone migration software thinking it would be a snap, but my spare won't let the master HD (a serial ata) boot to windows without an "NTDLR is missing" message stopping the whole show. If the spare isn't connected, his dying HD wants to try and boot to windows (getting the EIDE controller message). I've tried messing with the slave and master settings to no avail, and the only HD the migration program will recognize is my comp's serial ata.

Where do I start? What do i fix first? Thanks for any assistance you might be able to give me.

To be honest this is not really my fortay but when a harddrive starts making noises it is normally too late, the tick, tick, tick being the death knell. In stead of driveclone I would just slip the harddrive into a caddie and take off only the stuff I need, the less use the better if it is dying that is.

There's an interesting solution using Ubuntu posted elsewhere in the forums - just a sec, I'll search for it...........


Got it! Here's the link: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/ind...st&p=347616

This post (and the next one by me) describe how to do this over a network - it should be simple to just copy it to another hard drive using the Ubuntu live distro.