Hard drive dying, can I save old program?

Factual Questions
1

I have a hard drive that is going bad. On the hard drive is a program that interfaces with a machine.

The software is no longer supported, new software costs a couple thousand dollars, and I cannot find the original. I am sure this has been asked before, but, am I hosed?

Can I copy the software and put it on a new computer and manually input the registry keys (assuming the drive lasts that long)?

Can I ghost it? I have a feeling I am good for ten minutes or so at a time until the drive heats up and quits.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

2

Pick up a copy of Norton Ghost and a spare drive. Image the drive to the spare drive (external or internal). Put a new hard drive in and copy the image back to the new drive. You won’t even know anything changed.
In the mean time, I would keep that computer off.

Also, if you have a spare computer, this will be easier if you can put the dying drive into the other computer as a slave and image it from there.

3

I don’t know if you can image a drive in 10 minutes, but that would obviously be the best option.

It should be possible to copy the program files over and get it running. You might not need any registry keys, but you can take advantage of Regedit’s Export feature if time is limited.

You also might need to copy some dll files from your Windows system folder. Hopefully not. You can see whether the program complains about missing files when you run it on the other drive.

4

We had a drive at work start dying. We couldn’t keep it up long enough to install Ghost. It went from rebooting every ten minutes to rebooting every 2 minutes. I think for a while it was just clicking.
I set it up as a slave on another computer and imaged it from there. Took a looong time becuase it was having so many problems, but eventually I got it.

And to re-iterate, keep the computer off until you’re ready to do something with it. The more you keep it on, the worse it’s going to get. Hard drive failure’s can go from bad to worse in a matter of an hour.

5

This drive sounds like a good candidate for freezing - seal it in a ziplock bag, then pop it in the freezer overnight. Next day, take it out of the bag, and with luck it will be able to boot and stay alive long enough to be imaged.