I assure you those were NOT the words I actually used.

Client had a hard disk going out (no backups, of course), and two urgent projects for the weekend. It was another of those 20-Gig Fujitsus with the self-destructing chips.

Drive ran well enough cold, so I chilled it while I preped a new 40-Gig. The 20 had two partitions but the second wasn't used any more. I booted on the old one, and XCopied the old to the new with /s/h/r/e/c. Shut down and booted on a DOS floppy. With XTree, I removed attributes from \\Windows on the new drive and recopied \\Windows\\*.* to get the registries over.

Next, I set up the new drive as master and installed Windows 98 on it over the existing files and registries. Voila! a perfect working Windows with no need to reinstall any software or licenses.

Worked fine for a week - then - the Program from Hell struck. The old drive had used BootMagic (shipped with PartitionMagic) to dual boot between the Windows 98 partition and a DOS/Windows 3.1 partition (to run an engineering program that only ran under 3.1).

Now, BootMagic had never been installed on the new drive, but somehow some remenant of it awakened, announced that the Partition Table was damaged, and kindly "adjusted" it to match the old 20-Gig drive, and also corrected the BIOS Parameter Block to match. "Invalid Media" was about all you counld get out of the hard disk, which now contained a new 70 page document that was desperately needed "right now!" - and there was no backup.

Time to try to remember how to hand edit partition tables and BIOS Parameter Blocks.

Since Symantec has run everyone else out of busines, I have to use Norton DiskEdit on newer hardware. Got the location where the partition started and a count of the FAT length, etc. Eventually got it all back up and running.

Now, for anyone who ever has to do this, Norton Diskedit has a nifty Advanced Recovery function that allows you to mod the parameters and test to see if they're right. DON'T USE THIS BECAUSE IT DOESN'T WORK. Parameters that test out OK are WRONG (in multiple places). They will not actually work. Parameters that will work do not test successfuly. Typical Norton crapola.

The FAT table is easy on a "use all and make bootable" disk. For the BIOS Parameter Block I set up and examined a couple of similar drives, then edited correct parameters directly into the BIOS Parameter Block. Norton DiskEdit does do that part just fine.

Client said he is now going to think about some kind of backup system.

. . to move everything to a new hard disk without having to reinstall any drivers, software or otherwise touch a properly working** Windows installation. This particularly saves time when the owner has lost all the drivers (almost always), and essential when the owner "can't find all those software installations CDs" (most of the time).

The XCopy gets just about everything but the registries and other open Windows files (the /c parameter is essential so it keeps on copying after errors (such as not being able to copy a registry file)). The files it can't copy are then copied booted to DOS.

Installing the same version of Windows 98 onto this disk should adopt all registry settings, hardware drivers, licenses, etc. It won't even ask for the registration key (but you'd better have gotten that from the registry anyway, just in case something goes wrong).

Yes, the registries have nothing on the MBR, BIOS Parameter Block or any other low level disk stuff, so the new disk is no problem even if it's a radically different size.

Now, if you put this new disk in a new machine, you're going to have to play with drivers a bit, but that's usually no big problem - and the software installs will still be OK. In the same machine, nothing should notice that anything has changed (except there's more room).

If the source disk is really flakey, you may have to just XCopy the Windows directory structure, install Windows and boot on the new drive, then XCopy directories one by one. I've had to restart Windows as many as twenty times to get everythng from a dying disk.

I've never used ghost, because it requries too much preparation, a properly working machine, etc. By time a machine comes to me it's either too late, not networked or something. My methods (I have several) are easy, require minimal preparation, and work most of the time.

If you have to blow the registries, that makes things a lot more complex, but you can still preserve the desktop, start menus and such. A lot of icons won't work until you reinstall the software, though. I have to emphasize that to the client because the machine looks exactly the same.

Xtree Gold can be made to work from a single boot floppy with plenty of room for other utilities. All you really need are the basic functions and the editor. Generally it can open only a single subdirectory at a time on todays systems due to memory limitations, but that's usually enough.

With Windows up and running, use ZTree, a much more modern interpretation of XTree without the limitations (also available for OS/2), but it won't run under DOS. ZTree is great for doing copy operations Explorer doesn't support or support well. I use a combination of all three of these tools when reconstituting a system after major surgery.

I've found some Windows95 installations cannot be reconstituted no matter what, you have to upgrade to Windows 98 to get the machine to run again.

**for Microsoft's definition of "properly working".

The program that blew out the partition table and boot data wasn't Partition Magic, it was Symantec's Norton AntiVirus - and it did it again in another week (but I had all the details written down and fixed it in a couple minutes).

It appears NAV wakes up every week or so and looks at the boot info and partition table. It see's they're different from something it has stored somewhere and says, "EEEEEEEK! A Virus must have done this", and restores the old boot data and partition table.

Needless to say, I unistalled Norton and removed every trace of it I could find. Told the client he could reinstall it at his own risk.

I haven't seen a floppy based virus for five years. Everything is email and network now, and some are very sneaky. Many will infect just by appearing in the Outlook email preview window. They can even be implated by visiting a hostile Web site.

Expecting normal Windows users to not get infected is futile. I seldom see a computer that doesn't have at least a few infected files on it these days. Some antivirus program is needed.

I agree that Norton is the worst of the lot. Any product that's "Norton" anything, I avoid like the plague. They are all designed to be "smarter than the user", and put their hooks deep into the operating system. If something actually does go wrong, they can be highly destructive.