Copy a harddrive from a failed desktop machine using a second working one

Question

Heres the scenario:

I have PC-A, an old PC that runs Windows XP but now refuses to boot due to a failed motherboard (or maybe PSU). This PC has a single 80gb IDE drive.

I also have PC-B, running Windows Vista, this is working fine.

I want to copy all the data off PC-As HDD onto PC-B. To do this I have taken the HDD out of PC-A and connected it as a slave to PC-B. PC-B now boots and sees the additional drive.

However, when I attempt to access/copy user folders (i.e. Documents and Settings/[username]/*) I am told that I cannot access the folders due to user permissions. I am doing this under an adminstrator account on PC-B.

So the question is, how can I "backup" the data? Preferably without making any changes to the drive contents. The reason for this is that it is possible that PC-A is failing due to a bad PSU, so I intend to replace it before writing off the machine. However I would feel much happier if I had a backup of the data on the HDD.

Answer 1

If you don't want to make any changes to the data on the disk at all, I recommend using a disk cloning utility (like CloneZilla or Ghost4Linux, which is available on the Hiren's bootCD) to create a full disk image.

Basically this reads the entire disk and writes the entire contents to an image file on another disk. This means you can restore the data to a state exactly like the day you created the image.

Answer 2

Try booting with a Linux Live CD and mounting both drivers then copy what you want between them.

Ubuntu Live should auto-mount but not sure... personally I use "Trinity Rescue Kit".