Migrate 80 GB worth of files from one NTFS drive to another with metadata and error correction

"Much better solution:

So I was copying all files with 7zip archives, in the hopes that I could continue running these applications with the same data files in Windows 7, and it kept failing on CRC errors (apparently my disk is dying as well as the video card). Unfortunately, it also looks like Windows 7 64-bit is incompatible with all kinds of stuff I need to run. So I was getting frustrated and apprehensive.

However, it turns out there's an ""XP mode"" that will run applications inside a virtual machine to keep them compatible. Not only that, but there's a utility for converting your entire hard disk into a virtual hard disk for using inside this virtual machine! So not only can I copy all the files over to the new machine as a disk image, I can actually run my old apps inside the virtual machine if they aren't compatible with Windows 7, and not miss a beat.

Run havdetectiontool to see if your processor supports it
Enable virtualization in processor if not already enabled
Install WindowsXPMode_en-us and then Windows6.1-KB958559-x64
in the real XP machine, run Disk2vhd and copy your hard disk onto an external drive image (check the ""fix HAL"" option)
Copy the drive image onto the Windows 7 machine.
Go to Windows Virtual PC
At the top, there is button for Create virtual machine, click it
On the Add a virtual hard disk page, Use an existing virtual hard disk and select the drive image

Now your previous Windows XP installation is virtualized inside the Windows 7 installation, and you can attach USB devices and everything. You can also mount the virtual disk when the virtual PC is turned off, and move all the documents from it to the main hard drive, and then still see them all in the shared drives inside the virtual PC."

"What you want is a program called TeraCopy. It integrates into Windows and not only does it do all file operations quicker, it has a lot of extra features. One of them is checking to make sure each file was copied successfully. It will do a comparison between the source and the destination each file it copies. When the whole copy process is done it will show you all (if any) files that failed to copy along with the reason for it.

If you really want to go the ""image file"" route, you can just RAR or ZIP everything up. Do a md5 of the archive. Copy to the external, md5. Copy to final destination, md5. If the md5 values are the same at all points you can be reasonably sure that everything is intact."

You can use ddrescue which is the same as dd but it will try and rescue data if a read error occurs. ddrescue is a linux program you might be interested in if you know a but of linux http://www.forensicswikidotorg/wiki/Ddrescue.