Help - Failing C: Drive, how to I transfer OS to new hard disk?

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Why is this not straightforward?....



I purchased a Packard Bell "imedia" PC from PC World UK in about 2002. AMD
1.3Ghz. 20Gb C: drive with Windows XP home edition (OEM I assume) (SP2) and
a 40Gb D: drive added by myself a couple of years ago.



Ok, the C: drive starts reporting bad sectors and is on the way out. So I
purchased a replacement hard drive (Same manufacturer WD) 80 Gb. Then comes
the problem of transferring the OS to the new drive.



I don't have the original OEM XP disks (thanks PC world).



The new drive was installed (as a slave on IDE 2), formatted and partitioned
(NTFS) and set as drive E:



I first tried using NTBackup to backup the C drive (to the D drive), then
restoring this to E: However, NT Backup did not seem to backup and restore
every file (It missed several in the Windows\System32\Config folder). But
some hacking about with the recovery console (from an XP Home CD, not OEM) I
got these transferred across.



When I swap cables and jumpers to replace the C: drive with the E: drive, I
can get XP to display the boot.ini menu, and it will start loading the OS
Kernel, HAL and boot services. But it gets to MUP.SYS and just halts.



Having read some chat on similar problems, it seems that I shouldn't blame
MUP.SYS, it might be the next thing that loads. Trouble is, even with the
/sos switch, nothing else is displayed. Have tried safe mode etc.



I don't know if this is because the new drive/partition is labelled as E: ?



Anybody got any suggestions short of reinstalling XP and all the Apps? I
could obtain an OEM disk if absolutely necessary, but I feel frustrated that
something as common as replacing a failing system disk should prove so
painful.



Before anyone suggests using a drive image application, the C: drive seems
to have a 2Mb "unknown" partition at the start - preventing any simple
partition copy from working. I assume this is part of some
PCWorld/OEM/Microsoft anti piracy thing. Which I'm all in favour of, until
it stops me legitimately rescuing my failing system

Charlie
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