Help with new hard drive!

Somehow my old hard drive got some bad sectors on the boot partition and my system won't boot. I got a new hard drive and installed XP pro on it. I installed the old HD in my computer along with the new one and i can see the old one and still get files off of it. Is there a way to copy everything but the boot sector on to the new HD so my computer will be as it was before. I've tried Seagate tools and when i pick the old drive as the files to restore it doesn't recognize the new drive as the one to copy to. Any help is appreciated.

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major
There's a couple of different ways to handle this: you can clone the old hard drive in its entirety to the new drive, then repair/rebuild the boot info using from the Windows Recovery Console using the fixboot and the fixmbr commands with the info in this link. -OR- You can boot to a live CD (like Knoppix or the UBCD4Win). A live CD is a boot disc that contains a fully functional operating system that runs exclusively from the CD. This leaves your hard drives totally accessible so you can replace system files/folders without getting the "Access denied-file in use" error. Knoppix is a live version of Linux; the UBCD4Win is more like Windows, and has a built-in program called Unstoppable Copier which would be great for a scenario like yours. You'd select your old drive (say drive F: for example) as the source, and your new drive (drive C: ) as the destination. Then simply click "Copy" and all the files and folders will be copied over without copying the boot info. So if the new drive is booting to Windows now, using this method will replace all the system and program files but will leave the boot info alone. It may take some time to copy everything from the old drive to the new drive depending on how much stuff was on it, but it should work. So, there's your two options: clone the drive and repair the boot info; or boot to a live CD and copy the old drive to the new one as described. Here's some free cloning programs:
http://majorgeeks.com/Digital_Dolly_d5183.html
http://majorgeeks.com/EaseUs_Disk_Copy_d4845.html
http://majorgeeks.com/HDClone_Free_Edition_d3809.html
These programs are bootable; this means you'd create a boot CD or boot floppy, then boot to it to clone the drives. There are many other cloning/copy/backup type programs available here at Major Geeks; many are free and some run from within Windows, but I don't know if they'd work in this scenario because you cannot replace system files that are in use.
:-D
Good luck! Let us know how it goes!!

[dlb]

(oh yeah... the how-to-build-the-UBCD4Win guide can be found at this link and a full Windows XP install disc is required to build it; the Knoppix download is an ISO image file which you'd burn to a CD as an image and NOT as data; if you have any question about burning ISO files, or any questions about ANYTHING, feel free to ask!)