Transfering my Hard Drive Data

pseizure2000 · Post by **pseizure2000** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 3:28 am

So I have a feeling my one hard drive is about to go kaput so I bought a small 250 gig drive to transfer everything over to it. My failing drive has 2 partitions and xp on it and I want to basically make an exact copy of the drive so I can boot off of my new one. This has always seemed more complicated to me than it sounds. Any tips from you guys on how to do this would be great.

TheSovereign · Post by **TheSovereign** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 7:00 am

get the trial of acronis true image, that'll do ya

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 8:28 am

What he said. You connect the new drive as a spare on your PC. Run Acronis TrueImage (or any imaging software like Norton Ghost or whatever) and use the "Clone" feature to duplicate the entire original drive to the new one.

If you use the default settings, Acronis will resize the two partitions proportionally to fit on the new drive. You can also select Manual mode and resize the partitions any way you want yourself.

Very simple. For a modern PC the process shouldn't take more than an hour unless your drive is very full. When it's done, you swap out the drives. New drive will boot right up. Acronis takes care of copying the boot sectors and setting the boot partition to Active.

BE AWARE however that if there are bad sectors on the original drive, you may not be able to clone it. Acronis will try to copy bad sectors and if they're just weak, they will be copied. If they're unreadable it won't. You can skip bad sectors and if it's only one or two you will probably be alright (so maybe you lose an MP3 song or a photo somewhere).

If the drive is in seriously bad shape - for instance if you're getting SMART warnings that the drive is about to fail, you may want to backup any important data first. On a critically failing drive, the more you use it, the faster it will fail and the cloning process is going to accelerate that. Just trying to clone it may push it over the edge and kill the drive.

If your cloning software hits bad sectors it can't deal with it and aborts, then you can try running Spinrite Level 2 on the drive to repair it and then try cloning it again.

Acronis 15 day free trial: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/do ... trueimage/

Hope this helps...

pseizure2000 · Post by **pseizure2000** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 1:47 pm

thanks, hopefully this will work. I just woke up one day to the strange silence of my dead computer and, since it wouldn't turn on at all, figured my psu had just crapped out.

I replaced the psu but for some reason still had crazy problems booting. Random reboots and such. I think the circuit board on the hard drive might be having some power issues. For a while I thought it was might have been the motherboard, but I think getting rid of this ancient 60 gig drive should cure the malady.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 6:37 pm

Random reboots have nothing to do with a bad drive. A failing hard drive will make loud clicking noises and possibly cause BSODs or pauses in the operating system.

I think you need to ascertain whether the drive is failing or not. If the drive is failing you should see drive errors listed in the Windows System Event Log. You can also download the drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility which will pass or fail the drive.

Since your PSU took a surge it's more likely that any problems you have are related to that. Might have spiked the mobo and damaged something. Also you should remove and re-insert the memory sticks.

pseizure2000 · Post by **pseizure2000** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 11:47 pm

well it took two centuries but the clone finally worked (after failing halfway through the first time). The problem seems to have disappeared... for the time being. Plus the system boots much faster now.

Although I think you may have somewhat of a point FP, I noticed two leaking capacitors and several other bulging ones. Also somewhat worrying was noticing the old Asus 9600xt fan had gone dead for what looks like a while now (the sticker on the fan was severely heat discolored.

So now I'm thinking about moving this aging dinosaur into this spare system a friend gave me. It's a bit of unknown territory for me though since it's a TForce6100-939 with some ole Athlon 64 in it. Will I need XP 64? And how exactly do I move my operating system to another motherboard and cpu without getting BSODs left and right?

eGoCeNTRoNiX · Post by **eGoCeNTRoNiX** » Mon Aug 04, 2008 11:52 pm

You don't need XP 64, just need regular old XP, move your drives and perform a repair install and you should be good to go..

eGo

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Tue Aug 05, 2008 8:23 am

What he said ^.

Repair Install Tutorial:
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm