any microsoft gurus here?

[jimjohson]

see this just prompts another question from me. the last time i had to replace a hard drive (nearly 10 years ago) it came with a program to copy your old hd. has this changed?

I believe some drives do come with a program to copy over your old drives but this is becoming less common. But even so if you are having issues booting or running from the disk because it has bad blocks or is failing you may find that none of those copy programs work correctly.

If I need to copy a drive and don't have access to the appropriate drive cloner my preferred tool is xxcopy which is a free download. It has lots of options and runs in a command line. I have yet to find another tool that copies entire drives faster.

If you buy a RETAIL drive then it most often comes with such software. If you buy an OEM drive then not so much.

Of course you have to get the drive hooked up to something, and if it's an IDE and you buy a new SATA only computer, that can be tricky. There are adapter things that you can use, and external ESATA to IDE converter boxes, but this is all assuming the drive still works in the first place.

yeah i've had drives fail before i could retrieve the data. i know y'all did/do this stuff for a livin' i just tinker, got a 'puter in '85 and started figuring it out. mostly the nuts and bolts end. the last computer i really understood the programing in had 3.11 in it. my wife works with 'em she a draftsman in a cabinet shop, to me it's just a game platform. and so happens i have one of those external converter boxes as the 'puter i got (a dell) is sata and i got hds that aren't. think it was only like $5+s&h. well a couple years ago.