All,

After some gnashing sound from the hard drive and subsequent failure of that laptop hard drive, I've replaced it. I have a Windows XP Pro backup of that drive on a USB external and am wondering if there's any way to truly recover the guts of my information from the original hard drive. I've already partitioned the new drive and got it installed, run the recovery program and all my files are 'accessible', but it didn't go so far as to create proper registry entries. In addition, I've lost licenses for a lot of downloadable songs. Did I do something wrong on my recovery effort or am I expecting too much from the Windows recovery program in terms of placing everything in the right place on a new hard drive?

Thanks in advance for the help.

Is the backup that's on your USB external an "image" of the old drive or is it just a backup of all of your files?

It's just a backup created with the windows backup/restore program

But what option did you use in Windows Backup? The option to "Backup all information stored on this computer" or did you select certain files to backup?

If you use NTBACKUP with system state you can just apply the restore to the new install. It is the correct MS suggested way.

If you didn't use system state you can start with the system restore using ntbackup. It may or may not work correctly.

System State data contains most elements of a system's configuration, but it might not include all of the information that you require to recover your system from a failure. Therefore, it is recommended that you back up all boot and system volumes, including the System State, when you back up your system.

I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.