Old Laptop with failing HDD - Windows recover advice needed

[billythewiz]

Hi,

I have an old laptop (6yr old Acer 5920G - Core2Duo T7300, 2GB ram) that stopped working properly (it would freeze soon after boot). I don't know the exact cause of the problem, but I suspect a combination of old HDD and sudden power loss (the battery is completely dead so it relies on the power lead) had resulted in corrupted OS files (I can boot into safe mode and that seems reasonably stable).

All valuable files have been recovered (I think) and a new laptop purchased (8GB i5 for £350), but I would like a low cost solution for bringing it back to life.

I managed to get it to reset it back to factory settings and it now seems quite stable, but I know the HDD has 4 bad sectors, so I don't expect the HDD to last much longer.

Is there an easy way to transfer the OS (including its licence) to a new HDD in the same laptop ? Is something like clonezilla the way to go or are there better options ?

[kompukare]

Clonezilla would do the job but it's not very user friendly.

Easeus have a free cloner
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/home-edition/
as do Paragon
http://www.paragon-software.com/home.../features.html

Alternatively, there are the Acronis 'free' versions which are locked to specific HDD manufacturers:
http://support.wdc.com/product/downl...l.asp?swid=119
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/discwizard/

Windows is only tied to certain hardware like Mobo, NIC, etc. not HDD (they fail far too often), so your licence should be fine.