Hello,

I had a HDD crash a few hours ago.
I have replaced the damaged HDD and I am reinstalling Windows.
Is there anyway I can recover the settings from the old windows?
LIke users, IIS data, etc...

Well, if the hard drive still spins, try connecting it as a slave within another working PC.
If you can browse the file structure, you will be able to save data within directories.
I don't know what you mean by users, but if the above works, you will be able to browse to Inetpub and any other directory.
IIS also, by default, creates IIS metabase backups within C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv .
If your users are local or Active Directory, you lost that information unless you have System State backups.

Windows settings will not be recoverable as easily (most of that can be setup again anyways) but you would be able to recover application settings (such as an .ini file, .xml file or other configuration files).

If the drive is damaged, then there are drive recovery services for a hefty price.
Good luck.

Always, always have backup's and backup's of your backup's in geographically dispersed locations.

Thank you for you reply.

I meant Windows users.

I have installed a new operating system.
If i try to image the damaged the disk and restore it to another partition of another HDD (let's say partition d:) and swap the partition letters so that D: will become C: and viceversa, could I boot the old windows back?

By swap I referer to this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223188

Seems that the letters can be switched in registry.

But would this be logical?
Since I have HDD with 2 partitions ( c: new system and d: old system), if I change the registry of the booting windows, will it boot and drive letters will be changed?

Hum...That isn’t something I’ve tried. It doesn’t hurt to test it though.
It may not be logical but if you give it a try, what do you have to lose?
It may work and it may not.

You will most defiantly want to do this on a test machine vs. production.
The only key point is the test machine needs to have the exact hardware configurations if you do get it to boot on the old install. If you do get it to work, I wouldn’t make it a production machine.

Since you say this is a “damaged disk” you either have physical damage that can corrupt data during an image or you have data corruption from the beginning and may not be able to boot the old OS regardless (new disk or not). If it isn’t physical damage, at least you have a chance to try to repair whatever files caused the OS to fail.

Others here may have additional suggestions throughout the week.

I haven't tried that after all.
I lost much time trying to image that hdd.
It had bad sectors and could not be fully recovered.
Copied the needed files and reinstalled everything from scratch.

Also tried imagining and booting into a virtual machine.
It booted extremely slow but I got some error messages:
"the security id may not be assigned as the owner of this object"
I could not even enter local policy manager to try to fix this, so I gave up.