backup and move the windows harddrive

If your computer's harddrive is failing, and you bought a new harddrive and need to move your entire disk over to the new drive, simply use dd to do it. Assuming your new harddrive is connected to your computer via the USB connection (usb harddrive adaptor), you can simply do the following:

1. use another computer, download and burn a copy of Puppy Linux CD (keep this is very useful)
2. boot into puppy linux CD
3. open the command window, type
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sda bs=1M conv=sync,noerror
(note: depending your harddrive size and your USB speed, this may take a long time. I had a slow usb (12Mbits/s) and my final dd speed was 1Mbytes/second. So it took overnight to do the entire 40GB drive)
4. shutdown computer
5. install the new drive into your laptop
6. boot

Everything should work. I just tried one.