Hard Drive Hard Times

As you've noticed, I haven't posted much here lately... Well, ok, since (almost) no one reads this blog, I'm sure no one has noticed ;-) There are a few entries here that I refer back to from time to time regarding tech info, so I'm gonna use this entry to record future reference information for myself. I'm sure it will be completely boring for everyone else, but oh well...

Yesterday a computer in the accounting department died. Blue Screen Of Death... Hard drive failure... Ugh. It's a Dell GX280 going on four years old. I've had hard drive problems with these systems before. I actually preemptively replaced all of these hard drives once and haven't had too many problems since. Anyways, I wanna record my repair procedure in case I have to do this again because I know I'll forget the little nuances...

1. Boot from the Dell Recovery (Blue) CD
2. Exit Setup and go to the Recovery Console
3. Run chkdsk /R at the prompt
4. Get lucky and have this actually fix the problem
5. Realize the problem is actually the hard drive failing so I'm not done
6. Do the rest of these steps to replace the hard drive
7. Boot to Windows (XP Pro for me)
8. Load Ghost 9.0
9. Shut Down
10. Install 2nd (Blank) hard drive
11. Turn on machine and go into BIOS
12. Enable new hard drive so the system recognizes it
12.5 Log in as Admin
14. Run Ghost to duplicate hard drive
15. Set the following switches in Ghost...
- Check Source for file system errors
- Resize drive to fill
- Set drive active
- Copy MBR
16. Run it, wait for it to finish
17. Try to boot from new hard drive
18. It doesn't work... probably get something like...
"windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem"
19. Boot to old hard drive with new hard drive hooked up as 2nd drive
20. Log in as Admin
21. Start Menu - Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management
22. Right click new drive
23. Change Drive Letter & Paths
24. Add - F:
25. Shut down computer
26. Set up system with new hard drive as the only hard drive
27. Boot from the Dell Recovery (Blue) CD
28. Exit Setup and go to the Recovery Console
29. Run bootcfg /rebuild at prompt
30. It will ask a few questions after it rebuilds for a while
- Add installation to boot list?... Answer Y
- Enter Load Identifier... Answer Windows XP Professional
- Enter Load Options... Leave blank, just hit Enter
31. Reboot
32. The option of two installs to boot from comes up
33. Select the top one... Windows XP Professional
34. Log in as Admin
35. Right click My Computer and select Properties
36. Go into Advanced, Startup & Recovery, Settings, System Startup
37. Click the Edit button
38. Delete the bottom line to get rid of the faulty boot option
39. Save and exit
40. Reboot - Login as Admin - Unload Ghost

This same procedure has actually worked on two separate machines for me. I still have to reload the accounting software on the pc that I fixed yesterday, but other than that... so far so good (knock on wood)