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Kristi Seanort

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I am concerned about my hardrive crashing any moment now. I would like to buy another hardrive and install it internally in an open bay. I want to clone my exsiting windows vista and any other programs on my hardrive over to the new one. What is the best way to go about doing that? I am a true rooking when it comes to this so please step by step instructions would be very helpful to me.
 
Honestly, this is not something that a "rookie" would be able to do, not to mention buying and installing the drive, buying and installing some type of imaging software and getting it all to work on a crashing hard drive.

I am loathe to recommend one of the big box stores but they provide this service for a fee and would probably give some type of guarantee on the work.
--
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Ok, are you referring to like Best Buy or somewhere like that? I buy the hard drive and they will put it in?
 
Kristi Seanort said:
Ok, are you referring to like Best Buy or somewhere like that? I buy the hard drive and they will put it in?
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I can't speak for beshannon, but I'm pretty sure that's what was meant. I agree that changing out your hard drive and swapping the information probably isn't something you really want to do yourself, but I would rather you went to a local small computer repair shop to have the work done. Find one that's been in business in the same location for a few years and spend you money there. Best of luck to in any case.

--
Tacoma, Washington, USA
 
Kristi Seanort said:
I am concerned about my hardrive crashing any moment now.
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What makes you think your drive is going to crash?
Kristi Seanort said:
I am a true rooking when it comes to this so please step by step instructions would be very helpful to me.
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If you are a rookie, what makes you think your drive is going to crash?

Is it telling you, through built-in precautions, that your drive is going bad?

Like others have said, copying a whole drive including operating system to another drive is not easy to do especially if you only have one computer. Windows does not like being moved and it is easy to not copy all the files.

If at all possible, have someone do it for you that knows what they are doing.

Another thought, is it an old computer? There are very good new computers in the $400 range that come with a very compact case (vertical DVD drive and no room to add any drives or cards).
 
The reason i think it is going to crash is because it is sounding noiser than it ever has. Some programs are just shutting down and I know I am close to maxing out the memory on this machine. I am just assuming it is going to crash and want to take precautions BEFORE it does. This computer is almost 4 years old so in technology terms I think it is considered OLD. Maybe I am wrong. I just thought that if I have an open bay in my tower that it would be best route to take instead of spending money on a whole new tower. After the first post, I would definitely have someone else do this for me.
 
If you build the second hard disk into your computer, you can boot an operating system from a CD, a DVD or an USB stick and copy the contents of one disk onto the other. So the source disk is not the active one of a running OS during copying. But so you have only a snap-shot of your disk. But it still a delicate operation.

The operating system and the programs can be replaced after a potential crash as opposed to your documents, correspondence, photos, videos etc. An alternative solution could be to archive your stuff.

Network-attached storage (NAS) devices (even with RAID, mirrored storage) are affordable nowadays.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage

I am pondering on buying a RAID-1-capable one.

Cheers,

--
Iván József Balázs
(Hungary)
 
Kristi Seanort said:
The reason i think it is going to crash is because it is sounding noiser than it ever has. Some programs are just shutting down and I know I am close to maxing out the memory on this machine. I am just assuming it is going to crash and want to take precautions BEFORE it does. This computer is almost 4 years old so in technology terms I think it is considered OLD. Maybe I am wrong. I just thought that if I have an open bay in my tower that it would be best route to take instead of spending money on a whole new tower. After the first post, I would definitely have someone else do this for me.
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I just went through this a couple of weeks ago . . .

I thought my hard drive was going as the computer (almost 6 years old, but still a zoomer) was getting very noisy . . . a loud grinding sound!

Plus, it was running slow and often freezing up!

Turns out it wasn't the hard drive at all . . . but was the cooling fans on both my video card and the power supply!

Replaced both the power supply and the video card and now all is well!

--
J. D.
Colorado


  • "If your insurance company tells you that you don't need a lawyer . . . hire a lawyer!"
 
The first thing to do is make sure you have a backup, not worry about cloning a drive. You should have a backup anyway.
--
Simon Taylor - Phooto
 
Kristi Seanort said:
The reason i think it is going to crash is because it is sounding noiser than it ever has.
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Noisier in what way? If you hear what sounds like regular disk head movements, but a lot of them close together, that usually indicates paging or swapping (your system has run out of real memory and is using space on the hard disk as a very slow form of memory). Then your problem is with not having enough RAM (or with having run into the limits of 32 bit systems) rather than with the hard disk.

If the disk makes funny noises, then the drive may have problems like stiction (gummed-up lubricant keeping the platters from spinning), or its heads may be about to crash.

If your drive and operating system support it, you may want to check the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status. This is the drive's diagnosis of its own health. If the result is 'verified' (good), that does not prove the drive is OK, but if the drive tells you that it is sick, that's a good indication that it is living on borrowed time.
 
How do I check the drives S.M.A.R.T. system?

I can't seem to find my software (OS) anywhere and that is one reason I thought I should copy it over to a new drive.
 
Tom_N said:
If your drive and operating system support it, you may want to check the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status.
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On the other hand there have been known and documented reports of SMART status failures and incorrect warnings, this happened to me with a Dell that I owned.

http://www.computing.net/answers/hardware/smart-failure-predicted/34832.html

--
My photos http://brianshannon.smugmug.com/
My photo blog http://brianshannonphotography.blogspot.com/
My Flickr stream
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brian_shannon_photography/
 
If you have your recovery cd's then get yourself an external hard drive and all your docs, pics, all your personal stuff, copy them over to the external hard drive and store everything on that. You could get a program that would take an image of your entire drive also and store that on the external drive, update every few days. I've bought brand new hard drives that crashed in 2 days so there is no guarantee anymore on anything. The absolutely best bet is to subscribe to a service like carbonite, that will back up your entire drive to their servers and anytime you make a change or store something on your hard drive it is automatically sent up to Carbonite..if your hard drive crashes, when you put in a new one and get your operating system installed you can go online to carbonite (or whatever service you want to subscribe to) and download the entire thing to your new hard drive.
 
Or, for the enlightened using OSX, simply use Time Machine to a USB drive.
--
Simon Taylor - Phooto
 
MusicDoctorDJ said:
Turns out it wasn't the hard drive at all . . . but was the cooling fans on both my video card and the power supply!
Click to expand...
MusicDoctorDJ said:
Replaced both the power supply and the video card and now all is well!
Click to expand...
This often happens just because the fans and heat sink get choked up with dust - not a bad idea to open up your computer and carefully vacuum your computer once a year.
 
Kristi Seanort said:
How do I check the drives S.M.A.R.T. system?

I can't seem to find my software (OS) anywhere and that is one reason I thought I should copy it over to a new drive.
Click to expand...
Likely as not the OS that came with the computer was just stored somewhere on the original drive.

Kristi, whatever you do always try to keep an external backup copy (or two) of all you important data files. Also delete any data files you don't need. Computers tend to accumulate all kind of junk that slows them right down.

Good news is that somebody who knows what they are doing could probably clean up your computer and make it seem almost like new in a couple of hours. Ask them to clean up unnecessary files and add ons, remove duplicate files, un-install unneeded programs, and de-fragment the drive. They should also be able to tell you if you need a new hard drive, an additional drive or additional memory - and, if necessary, transfer your files and operating system to a new hard drive

It is not actually all that hard to do any of this - but it is of course far easier to get somebody who already knows how to do it for you.
  • C
 
Thank you for those that have replied. My question about using something Carbonite is how reliable are they? Has anyone on here EVER had to go to the site and re-download everything? I am so leary about using their service in hopes of NEVER having to retrieve it but what if I do have to get to it? I just want to know they are reliable.
 
My wife was running XP Pro with an old 40 gig drive and I wanted to clone a 500 gig to replace it. I'm a complete novice and was astounded how easy it was!

I bought a WD 500 gb drive, went to their web site: http://support.wdc.com/retailkit . I was using a PATA drive, you probably need a SATA drive.

Plug the drive into an open power slot and plug the ribbon cable on the back of the new drive. The only tricky part is choosing where to place the jumper. It is explained in the instructions.

Then download the wonderful Acronis software. It is a no-brainer method to clone the old drive into the new drive!

Then replace the old drive, placing the jumper so it is the master, and put the old drive to one side as a convenient backup drive.

I was shocked at how easy this was. It took about an hour from beginning to end!
 
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