I'm not sure if creating a drive to drive clone will work connected in that way, but creating old drive image and then restoring that image to new drive should work.  Once I created an image of a Dell laptop drive to external usb drive and restored the image to the new drive which is easier at least for me, and it worked fine.

  The one big problem I have is the drive I want to clone has bad sectors and I know it is not going to last much longer. I just used the image from the dell PC restore and it worked but it locks up a lot and does not respond sometimes when I click a program. I thought if I could maybe remove the HD from the laptop and install it in my PC then maybe I could clone it or use ghost and make an image. I know this is a long shot but wanted to at least try to make an image.

tdee wrote on Oct 7^th, 2010 at 5:10am:

Just to be clear, you're proposing to remove the laptop HDD, connect it internally to a desktop machine via 2.5-to-3.5 IDE adapter, and do your copying/cloning from the desktop machine?

Yes, that will work.  As tator suggested, you often get more consistent results by using images rather than direct cloning.  As Brian hinted at, direct cloning works best when the target (the new HDD) is physically installed where it's eventually supposed to be, so you don't always get satisfactory results when you build the new HDD elsewhere and later move it into its intended destination.


tdee wrote on Oct 7^th, 2010 at 9:28pm:

Okay, so that sounds like you don't have anything on the old, previously used XP installation that you're trying to save.  If you've already used DSR (Dell's PC Restore system), whatever used to be there has already been obliterated and you're back to square one--the XP installation as originally shipped by Dell.

In that case, you don't need to try and clone the entire HDD, all you really need to save is the hidden DSR system.  Transfer that to the new HDD and use that to rebuild the active XP partition.  Trying to clone your old HDD's active XP partition won't give you anything different.

My plan of attack would be to:

• move the old laptop HDD into your host desktop;
• unhide the two Dell partitions (DellUtility and DellRestore);
• image them to a temporary directory on the host;
• swap the new laptop HDD for the old HDD in the host desktop;
• partition it (include empty partitions for two Dell partitions);
• restore the two Dell partitions from the saved images;
• use my Dsrfix utility to repair the Dell MBR and DSR setup;
• move new laptop HDD into the laptop;
• use the DSR system to restore the active XP partition;
• apply further XP updates, your programs, etc.

What model Dell is the laptop?  How big is the old (failing) HDD?  How big is the new replacement HDD?  What cloning/imaging software will you be using?