Hard to say, to be honest. As a geek, the usual recommendation is to reinstall windows (any version) annually, or at least every time the planets align themselves for a new millennium.
But first and foremost upon any "major" hardware change involving the MB or its on-board devices.
Exactly what Frankenstein-state yours is in is unknowable... there's always the old proverb that says if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
At the very least, keep in mind that Image backups of the OS are still based (tied) on the same hardware - they are mainly intended for HD failures, not MB failures - even if, in your case, they "seem to work". You're "Golden Image" will just contain the same hidden cancers as the current install.
Laziness is indeed the usual excuse people use, and the pain of getting all their settings back. (Things like MozBackup are a good place to start, but inevitably limited in their scope.)
So is it "required"? Probably not, if everything is working ok, but if you're not planning on switching to Win7 anytime soon and expect to be with XP for awhile longer, and have a free Saturday - strongly consider it at least.
(If you do re-install OS + ultils, then that is the optimum time for a golden image, though images can always be "browsed" and nitpicked apart to retrieve old files/folders which can be very handy for finding lost .ini's, et al.)
dskchk fails on my 1 TB hard disk - How to recover data?
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A repair install maybe enough for making the machine work, I found XP quite stable after a MB-crash 1 year ago. But it may be, that there are some problems, which do not appear at once, so building the OS from scratch brings you on the safe site.
I suggest building a slipstream CD, where SP3 is integrated in you Windows cd. First advantage: You do not need to patch the newly installed Windows with the SP (which takes far more time); second advantage: If you sometime later have to do a repair installation you really have SP3 (which only has to get patched with the Windows-updates after SP3), a repair installation of a SP3-system with a pre-SP3-disk is not reliable, sometimes impossible. (For getting the boot sector for making the slipstream cd bootable you can also use BBIE instead of IsoBuster.)
I suggest building a slipstream CD, where SP3 is integrated in you Windows cd. First advantage: You do not need to patch the newly installed Windows with the SP (which takes far more time); second advantage: If you sometime later have to do a repair installation you really have SP3 (which only has to get patched with the Windows-updates after SP3), a repair installation of a SP3-system with a pre-SP3-disk is not reliable, sometimes impossible. (For getting the boot sector for making the slipstream cd bootable you can also use BBIE instead of IsoBuster.)
A Literary Definition of Narrative Closure:
The Western World likes harmony. It works for Bach, Brahms, and the odd Christmas Carol round. Dissonance worked well for Beethoven, but this thread is (hopefully) not your Große Fuge, just yet.
While I'm the first to bemoan the postmodernist movement, I'm not sensing any closure in your narrative.
Narayan, I do hope you don't tell your children bedtime stories, else given your misunderstanding of narrative closure, they'll live a psychologically unbalanced life with no real sense of re-established harmony.The classic realist text is characterised by narrative closure, which ensures that all the mysteries enacted during the process of narration are unravelled restoring the order that had been disrupted in the preceding narrative: ‘Decisive choices are made, identity is established, the murderer is exposed, or marriage’ resolves the fates of the characters, re-establishing the harmony at the end of the story.
The Western World likes harmony. It works for Bach, Brahms, and the odd Christmas Carol round. Dissonance worked well for Beethoven, but this thread is (hopefully) not your Große Fuge, just yet.
While I'm the first to bemoan the postmodernist movement, I'm not sensing any closure in your narrative.
Well, we Indians believe in the mutually exclusive concepts of reincarnation and nirvana, and my HDD seems to have attained one of those two, because it has not come back to life (via USB connection, at least).
I have downloaded the clonezilla, and will try it tonight.
P.S. Someone (equally lazy as me, no doubt) suggested a Live CD of Linux. He says that can recover the Windows files also. I think he referred to Knoppix flavor of Linux. I may try that if this Clonezilla does not work...
[EDIT] Clonezilla is not meant for windows!
I have downloaded the clonezilla, and will try it tonight.
P.S. Someone (equally lazy as me, no doubt) suggested a Live CD of Linux. He says that can recover the Windows files also. I think he referred to Knoppix flavor of Linux. I may try that if this Clonezilla does not work...
[EDIT] Clonezilla is not meant for windows!
I tried Odin for disk backup, but after some time it was consistently reporting failure. Then I noticed something that I should have noticed before:
The defective drive (placed currently in a USB adapter box) disappears automatically after some time!
The summary is-
1. After I plug in the USB drive and switch it on,
it takes a long time to display the AUTOPLAY dialog.
2. The partitions display for some time (a couple of minutes).
But they show up only in Disk manager; not in Explorer.
3. After a couple of minutes, the disk disappears from disk manager.
I think a similar thing may be happening when the disk is connected as internal HDD (SATA); which is why Windows XP hangs while booting up.
What could be the reason?
The defective drive (placed currently in a USB adapter box) disappears automatically after some time!
The summary is-
1. After I plug in the USB drive and switch it on,
it takes a long time to display the AUTOPLAY dialog.
2. The partitions display for some time (a couple of minutes).
But they show up only in Disk manager; not in Explorer.
3. After a couple of minutes, the disk disappears from disk manager.
I think a similar thing may be happening when the disk is connected as internal HDD (SATA); which is why Windows XP hangs while booting up.
What could be the reason?
As anything I could say would merely be an unconstructive guess, I can only offer this link as a possible answer. Unfortunately it is a knowledge-base article from "yet another" paid-for product claiming to save your world - which doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about.narayan wrote:What could be the reason?
It does though, answer your question, so it is worth reading (as if you haven't read enough already!) to educate yourself about your dilemma.
Draupadi, as I remember, caused herself no end of trouble in asking for "the perfect match", so sooner or later you might have to try a professional solution in spite of your desire to not bother for a "one off" event.
But don't give up and settle down yet.
As to your mentioning of the Linux solution - the "flavour" of Linux is basically irrelevant, as it isn't touted specifically as a recovery tool, any distro can provide a free bootable backdoor into reading a windows partitioned drive. Which is great if you can find a tool in their repository specifically aimed at NTFS recovery, but someone just blindly suggesting "oh try linux" is, in essence, just guessing. Grain of salt, as it were.
If you cannot keep the drive visible for more than a few moments, the lighter-weight freeware imaging solutions may not be suitable, but anything is worth trying. And, as referenced before, you aren't doing yourself any favours by using a potential MB driver/SATA-controller mismatch spawned from your previous "shortcut". If you have access to another PC, try it there first with whichever recovery tool strikes your best fancy (as best-of-the five [Pandava?] brothers, I still have a soft-spot for the RoadKill one, for some unknowable reason).
You have nothing to lose but the time you gained by being (self-described) lazy in the first place.