failing HD, on new drive can I use e-recovery?

Have an Aspire One model ZG5 AOA150-1570 running winXP.

The hard drive has had a failure and after running disk checks (dskchk) using a special mini XP boot CD, I was able to view and copy my important files, pictures and videos to a thumb drive. Now I need to replace the drive but can I somehow use the directory and files of the protected area/hidden partition on the bad drive and copy that to a new drive and use those files to restore to initial specs on the new drive using e-recovery. I can use the alt-f10 to boot to the e-recovery on the bad drive but since the drive is bad I don't want to revert to factory specs.

Again can I install a new hard drive and somehow copy all the files needed (what files would they be?) from the old drive to the new drive and then run the e-recovery restoring the computer to factory specs with this new drive installed??

If for some reason I can't do that or if it fails while trying I can always reinstall with a new installation of XP.

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IronFly

yes, you can but not so easy to have it working from a new HDD, since you need to make it bootable modifying the MBR.

i would suggest an easier solution, like cloning the bad HDD to a newer HDD, must be same size or bigger.

http://clonezilla.org/

clonezilla is a bootable image that can help you to clone your old HDD to a newer one, so you will have all you configuration without any issue.

the boring part....time, this will take a lot of time and can stress the old HDD to fail easily under the process.

AceOne

thanks, the bad drive will not boot into windows. I have tried everything to repair the windows installation but the reinstallation/repair just keeps restarting and restarting. I downloaded the hard drive test from WesternDigital and after running it "states too many errors". I can only access this bad drive after booting using a special mini-XP windows CD. It will show my bad C: drive, that's how I was able to copy my files to an external thumb. Since I can see this drive, I was just wondering if I can copy files from it, to a thumb drive and then maybe install a clean XP on the new drive in the old acer, get it up and running then copy over the files needed from the thumb to run the e-recovery to restore everything as factory.