A short history of transplantation

A short story of transplantation

There was a rainy, ordinary day. Nothing extraordinary, just me coding websites for clients after lectures. I've ramped up PHP Storm and started coding, I felt that this day will be good. Everything I wrote, implemented was working. Excited, I've been carrying on until... a "click" came from my main HDD. I've been reassuring myself, that my imagination is playing some dire tricks on me. After some time later another click, but not one. A series of clicks occured, rendering system frozen. Nothing wanted to work.

The HDD is slowly dying, especially its mechanical part, probably due to shock applied.

Unfortunately BSoD occured, killing my system. After reboot I could not get past BIOS/UEFI screen, HDD was still clicking, no matter what I tried. Removing HDD from case and then letting it sit for a while, connecting to external enclosure didn't work. Except one thing - putting the specimen in freezer for a while. DO NOT DO IT. THAT MIGHT FUCK UP YOUR HDD. You've been warned.

Guess what? Miracle happened. HDD stopped cliking, allowing me to clone partitions to another hard disk.

I've booted up my second PC, where I store backups of my projects and memes. It is an IBM/Lenovo ThinkCentre PC equipped with:

2GB of DDR2 RAM
Intel Pentium 4 HT (1C/2T) 3GHz
Two HDDs: one 80GB for Debian 9, 250GB for backups.

Having Debian 9 installed there, I've configured an SMB server, so I can copy and store the disk image. There is only one share, exposing whole HDD to LAN. For curious, config entry:

///file: /etc/samba/smb.conf
[backups]
  comment = backup files
  guest ok = yes
  read only = no
  browseable = yes
  path = /mnt/backups

This entry exposes /mnt/backups directory to LAN, allowing to be browsed thru network discovery, allowing to write files there, also making sure that everone from LAN will be able to open this share. Remember to restart samba: service smbd restart && service nmbd restart

After making sure that samba is running: service smbd status, I've burned Hiren's Boot CD 15.1 to a DVD, and then booted my PC to Mini Windows XP rescue enviroment.
Thanks to crapload of different recovery tools I can copy over nessesary partitions to files, allowing me to restore them to another HDD later.

Tool used for this job is named DiskImage XML. The tool reads raw data, including partition table to compressed files. Disk metadata is stored in XML files.
I had to copy system partition and "System Reserved" parition, which contains BCD data. (Windows boot config) and data from second HDD. Of course - I have been repartitioning disks, so images will fit.

Copying went flawlessly, leaving me with ready-to-use disk images, so I deleted partition table on donor disk and proceeded to restore on another HDD. Guess what? **It worked. Windows freaking booted up. **

I hope that you liked this post, Cheers!a