How wrong can it go - copy over system files?

[Pete.]

I have a laptop here belonging to a family member. It's an Acer 5250 that had a humongous wad of fluff built up in between the fan and heatsink causing it to over-heat and lock up under load which has resulted in many corrupt system files. I stripped it down and cleaned out the obstruction so now it runs ok except the damage to the file system is such that it still freezes for long periods doing certain things (when opening web browsers, windows explorer etc).

It's got a half-terabyte drive which is half full of vids, music, uni work, plus the operating system. Thankfully, I've managed to create the four re-install DVD's and verified the hardware is working fine by swapping the HDD for a 120GB one that has taken a fresh install successfully.

I don't have anything big enough to back up the 200GB or more of user files on the 500GB drive to perform the same feat so what I want to do is copy the system files form the fresh install across to the old windows folder on the drive installed in a caddy. Which files can I hope to successfully port over to the old installation without royally screwing the installation up?

In short - two hdd's, both built from the same recovery partition, one in 2011 the other today. Can I copy over folders like sytem32 to repair broken files?
____________________
a.k.a 'Geri'

132.9mph off and walked away. Gear is good, gear is good, gear is very very good

[The Artist]

Copy off the stuff you want to keep like pictures and music.
Fresh OS install.

If it has overheated and you are seeing issues because of this, it won't be a corrupted files, it will be hardware problems with most likely the CPU. I would call the machine a write off but worth a shot at a fresh install of an OS.

[Pete.]

I haven't got anything to copy off 200GB onto, that's the problem.

The machine itself is fine. It's currently running half a gig of updates on the spare 120GB drive and hasn't missed a beat. Once the updates are done I'll run a stress test to make sure it doesn't fall over under load but ATM it's good.
____________________
a.k.a 'Geri'

132.9mph off and walked away. Gear is good, gear is good, gear is very very good

[treeno]

Have you tried running a chkdsk c: /r in command prompt? That could fix any hard drive errors, assuming they are just corrupted files. Could also possibly be hardware damage as the artist said, but try a chkdsk first. If it is hardware damage, I would say it's most likely the hard drive which can be verified by running a stress testing program with that fresh install on a new disk. Laptop CPU's run hot and would likely reach TJmax and shutdown before damage was done, I doubt it's that.

Give up on that old installation if a chkdsk does not fix it, trust me. Have you got a desktop computer? If you can't rescue the installation then plug the disk into the desktop and copy the files over. Then completely wipe the laptop drive, perform a fresh install, connect back to desktop and copy the files back. This method will take a couple of hours but will be totally worth it in terms of performance over fiddling around with an old installation.
____________________
Current ride: Ninja 500R

[Pete.]

I ran a chkdisk on the original drive which found a few dozen orphaned files but no bad sectors. I also ran msert coz it's a handy standalone checker which reported no suspicious files. This is when I decided to fit a new drive and run an install, which promptly fell over when starting services which is what caused me to strip the thing down and found that wad of fluff jammed in the fan outlet.

The new install is still running updates ATM - 138 of 'em
____________________
a.k.a 'Geri'

132.9mph off and walked away. Gear is good, gear is good, gear is very very good

[CaNsA]

run a "scannow /sfc"
It will check the system files.
You can also doa system repair if you boot from a windows disc.

or

How much free space is on the drive?

Re-size the partition and install windows to the new partition.

[StormCrow]

Minor correction - you need to run 'SFC /scannow'

That will compare all Windows installation files to the files on the drive and replace any that it find that are damaged. Well worth a try before you have to go reinstalling Windows - works probably 7/10 times...

[Pete.]

I'm running it now, currently at 32%. If it works I'll be astounded and grateful in equal measure

EDIT: "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation"

Running it again with /verifyonly switch

2nd EDIT: got to 32% verifying, crashed and re-started

SFC just copies DLL's from the dllcache folder into system32 right? I'm going to hang this driv off another pc and copy them all over manually.
____________________
a.k.a 'Geri'

132.9mph off and walked away. Gear is good, gear is good, gear is very very good

[Pete.]

Currently have the affected drive hanging off the fresh install in a caddy, running SFC is offline mode with the following command:

sfc /verifyonly /offbootdir=g:\ /offwindir=g:\windows

Using verifyonly first after reading some scare story about someone making their drive un-bootable.
____________________
a.k.a 'Geri'

132.9mph off and walked away. Gear is good, gear is good, gear is very very good

[P.]

If you need a sizeable drive for temp, I have a 500GB sitting here doing nothing, USB one. Can drop round if needed

[Pete.]

[Rogerborg]

Dat. I've had it with trying to fix OSen in place. If I'm doing volunteer tech support now, I won't touch it until they invest in a backup drive.
____________________
Biking is 1/20th as dangerous as horse riding.
GONE: HN125-8, LF-250B, GPz 305, GPZ 500S, Burgman 400 // RIDING: F650GS (800 twin), Royal Enfield Bullet Electra 500 AVL, Ninja 250R because racebike

[SQL]

Was gonna say if you have access to the internets I can give you 1Tb quota to use on my NAS but Paddys with probably be quicker

[Pete.]

Cheers mate but Paddy came through with the loan of a backup portable drive - cheers Paddy!

I got most of the data backed up with many odd stop-starts whilst copying files. It would copy anything from one file to a couple of Gb then just stop on a particular file - or copy it very very slowly. I would have to cancel the copy then un-plug the usb lead for the suspect drive and go from the next file on. Bit of a tedious process but I got most of the data off it until the old drive eventually turned up it's toes. Dunno what killed it - heat from the CPU perhaps or maybe just one of those things.

So the laptop is now running perfectly with a fresh install of Win7 on a 120GB drive I borrowed out of another machine. I just bought another 500GB drive which will be fitted in a few weeks when the guy comes back from Uni.

Cheers for the help!
____________________
a.k.a 'Geri'

132.9mph off and walked away. Gear is good, gear is good, gear is very very good

[P.]

Well, could be when it overheated and the machine shut off with no actual unloading of devices, it can possible corrupt the volume allocation bitmap.

I've only had an issue once, but it was based on the old FAT32 type partitions, NTFS was marginally better.