Wow, this thread is exactly what I need. My wife's laptop hard drive is generating errors in the XP System Log. (She tells me that she noticed it going dog slow two days ago and asked me to investigate today. And, naturally, we haven't been doing any backups.)

Tomorrow, I'll go out and get a new hard drive. The question is, of course, how to evacuate and how to restore. I've got a backup running right now to see how much I can evacuate without too much pain. It's slowing down horribly on the bad blocks. Hopefully it will succeed. If not, I'll have to look into these various tools. SpinRite sounds a bit like awesome genius and a bit like technobabble, but if I can spend $49, wave a magic wand, and get the drive into sane enough shape for a standard backup tool to do the job, that would be fantastic.

Just to complicate things further, we don't have the original Dell recovery media handy (they're at home in storage, somewhere). That means that I'd really like to use one of these automagical tools that saves me from needing to reinstall XP and all the applications from scratch. So far, I'm using the 15-day trial of Acronis True Image, since it claims to be able to make this sort of thing magically work (assuming it can get the bits off the disk in the first place).

Oh, and I'm leaving Tuesday on a business trip. My wife would quite like to have all of this resolved before I leave. Grumble.