Hooray for Tim, SpinRite, and Image for DOS!

I am once again regretting that I have not been taking notes, thus requiring that I re-learn how to do things I’ve done before, now that I’m trying to re-image my PC again. It’s a Toshiba Portege M200 tablet PC.

Recently, I had a hard disk failure that made my PC unbootable. Horror of horrors! I started having withdrawal symptoms just thinking about my PC-less prospects. My magnificent hero, Tim, used SpinRite to recover my disk, the 80 GB drive that I’d had in the computer since I bought it in 2005. However, SpinRite reported some unrecoverable errors, and we weren’t quite sure of the full integrity of the hard drive.

Then we went to Fry’s Electronics and bought a WD Scorpio Blue 320 GB EIDE notebook hard drive, and Tim used Image for DOS to put the 80 GB hard drive image onto the 320 GB drive—in a partition that was a bit bigger than 80 GB (90 or 100?). I didn’t even know that putting an image onto something a different size was even possible. (Weeks later, we found out that using an NTFS partition for that would be a problem.)

Somewhere in this process, which took most of a weekend, the file system lost track of the rest of the 320 GB, so I have not been able to use the extra space on the notebook hard drive. Tim and I decided to address that problem on a different weekend. I used the PC for a couple weeks like that, but I planned to take Tim’s advice and install BootIt™ Next Generation to set up a clean partition that I could fall back on in the future.