Hey guys. I need some help. Lately, I've been having some problems with my 160GB HD. It may have been damaged a little internally.. or have some very bad sectors. None the less, I just went out today and bought a new Sata hard drive and it has 320 GB. Now I was thinking and have 2 choices. Should I just do a fresh install on the new HD and then re-install all my programs again? Flash/PS/DW etc... and my burning software and drivers etc.. or Should I just copy the old HD directly to the new HD.. and I suppose I wouldn't need to so anything, bescause I just have to set it to boot the new HD. I'd prefer something like this though. Just wondering what way would be easier and more hassle free. Also mabye providing some steps.? Thanks for your time.
I would advise against doing a straight clone if you are unsure what the major malfunction is with your 160. You never know, you might propagate the errors to the new drive and then what good would you have done? Have you tried any disk utilities to fix the 160? Or what was it doing funky to begin with?
Well.. the 160 worked fine for like a year. After that a one day I heard a clickly noise.. kinda like a record skipping.. and when it did that, the PC would lockup for a few secs.. resume as normal.. then "click click" again and lock up.. After that XP never loaded, it would always say Insert Boot Disc. So I used my XP disc, used the recovery section and checked the HD and ran some option to fix sectors and then XP worked. Now again, after about a month or less.. I ahd that clicky noise and then PC locks... Someone was tleling me that noise most likly means it is internally damaged?
indeed, it sounds like it's toast. you would have been well advised to have done the changeover last month BUT, if you can still clone it go for it. anytime you hear noises coming from your hard drive that sound like you just stuck a broom handle in a fan blade...try and get the data off asap!!
well.. it seems to be running fine all day today.. then again who knows when it will make that noise again and lock up.. also for the cloning.. what's the best tool to use for that? I've never done cloning before... I'm sure if I can get the proper tools and some info/walkthrough I can get through it
Yeah, I wouldn't push it if I were you. You are lucky it still works IMO. not sure on freeware stuff. I bought Acronis True Image and it works like a champ. Hopefully someone else will chime in to give you an alternate!
I used the same program and it cloned pretty well. The only downside I've noticed is that windows XP takes longer to load on startup than before... also my ram seems to be getting eatin a little more than before... hence PC sometimes is slightly laggy? Should I defrag or chkdisk the new HD?
i have used the ghost and it works pretty well in cloning! just make a 160gb partition in the new one and simply clone it, i have tried it with 40gb harddisks and it works pretty well, but then it may clone the logical bad sectors as well, it won't do any hardware damage, but then can cause errors at times
I would do both. It might try and load things on start up but it shouldn't make your system lag I wouldn't think. You might be able to tell it not to do anything at start up (like load the automatic backup scheduler for instance).
If i were you, and i have two HDD of which one is showing signs of being corrupted by bad sectors then i would first try to back up all the important data onto the second disk using windows internal backup and restore program. and then i would go ahead and first do a checkdisk To do that boot the system with Win XP CD and then use recovery console and in comand prompt i woult type chkdsk /r and let it run n try top fix the bad sectors automatically . If unsuccessful i would then go ahead and do a complete re-installation by doing a SLOW format using NTFS so that it first erases all File allocation tables and then re writes the new one's on the sectors of the HDD and then install OS on top of it. It will definitely make it work like a brand new HDD. Sandra