So disk imaging didn't work...

[KiLLerCloWn]

... my disk still works but it's obviously it's the way out!

Arconis True Image threw up an error that it couldn't read from the disc to be cloned, I selected to "ignore all" upon which it continued for a while, then at some point it was just stuck at the same progress point for about 4 hours. At that point I decided that this wasn't going to work.

So I installed a couple of new discs, labelled H: through Q:

I was thinking I could simply install Windows 7 on H: while keeping the current installation on C: alive alive until until I have all my software installed on the new disc.

Will that work? I guess I would simply have 2 Windows installations to choose from when I boot?

Until one day I will finally have all my software installed on the new drive in the new OS and then I can just scrap the old one.

Do you think that's a good idea for me to be able to continue work while I set up the new system? Or do you have any other tips maybe?

Many thanks as usual

Chris

[ZYFER]

Well, the biggest concern would be the loss of data. If you continue to work with the old drive and continuing to store things on there, that would definitely be not such a good thing to do.

You can still run certain stuff on there and store the important stuff on the new one, but this probably would start to over complicate things for you.

You can have 2 Windows installations, but you wouldn't want your boot loader on the old drive for obvious reasons. If you could, it really would be a good idea to just take the time to get all the software installed so there would less of a hassle to deal with overall. Once you got it all setup, you can create a system image to restore from so it won't be such a hassle in the future.

As for the cloning process, likely it is stuck trying to read from the drive and it cannot. If a major portion of the drive is unreadable, it might seem frozen, but it is really failing to read many sectors one at a time.

[FlyingPenguin]

You have two choices: Buy Spinrite and run a level 2 scan on the drive which MAY fix/recover the bad sectors the clone hung up on and let you clone it.

Or just install the new drive and go ahead and do a clean install of Windows (DO NOT have the old drive connected during the OS install!!). THEN after the new OS is up and working, with all your drivers installed, connect the old drive as a spare either via SATA or a SATA to USB adapter and copy your data (you cannot copy programs with the exception of Steam games - see below).

You're better off doing the clean install and not inheriting any corrupt files or registry settings from the old OS.

Some notes:

If you use iTunes, and not all your music is actually in the iTunes library folder, then you want to consolidate your music into iTunes first using the old OS. You can then copy the entire iTunes folder under My Music to the new PC.

Tutorial here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4527

The folders you will want to copy from your old PC to your new one are:

- My Documents

- My Music (if this is a Vista/Win7 PC, otherwise this will be under My Documents)

- My Pictures (if this is a Vista/Win7 PC, otherwise this will be under My Documents)

- My Favorites (if you use IE)

- Anything on your desktop that contains files (some people leave folders on their desktop)

- Your Steam folder. You do NOT need to re-download all your Steam games. Just install Steam on the new OS then copy the entire Steam folder from the old drive to the new one.

- Firefox: If you use Firefox, download MozBackup which is free and easily backs up and restores your entire Firefox profile (same for Thunderbird if you use that): http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/

- If you use Outlook, the free trial version of BackRex for Outlook will easily backup everything and restore it to the new OS exactly as it was:
http://backsettings.com/outlook-backup.html

Oh, and from now on, use Acronis to image the boot drive once a month or so. If this happens again, or something corrupts your OS install, you can restore the last Acronis image.

I don't even have System Restore enabled. It's worthless. I have Acronis setup to image my boot drive once a week on a schedule.

I also, to avoid losing data when restoring the boot partition from a backup, keep my data on a different drive. The ONLY thing on my boot drive is the OS and apps. It's easy to relocate your personal folders to another drive or partition, and even Steam can live on another drive. I explain this in much more detail here:

ZEN AND THE ART OF HARD DRIVE PARTITIONING (Partitioning for power users)
http://soldcentralfl.com/flyingpenguin/ ... ning.shtml

Hope this helps...

[KiLLerCloWn]

Thanks for the great advice!

I have all my data backed up on Separate drive, and my C drive only holds the operating system - file loss is not the issue.

My main worry is that I have so many things like Adobe Creative Suite, 3D Studio etc which are huge installations and take literally hours and hours to install. That's what I wanted to avoid, it'll take me two full days to be up and running again.

Looks like I'll have to bite the bullet and just go through with it

Now that I have bought Arconis periodic image backups will be scheduled, makes sense!

FWIW I made a paste and copy backup of my entire drive to one of the new ones and it only seems to be a couple of directories which are affected by the read errors. I will erase those and try cloning again - not getting my hopes up though

Thanks again for the great help

Chris

[FlyingPenguin]

Poor man's Spinrite: Right click on the drive in My Computer, click the Tools tab, click "Check Now" and then check "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors". AFTER that do it again but select "Automatically Fix File System Errors".

Spinrite actually does more because it can recover part or all of a bad sector while Scandisk will just throw out all the data in a bad sector.

[KiLLerCloWn]

Thanks FP - that was the first thing I did even before posting here - told me that everything is dandy, no errors found! Go figure, lol

I'll be starting the new installation tomorrow - pain in the neck but I should have cloned before, so time to bite the bullet

Cheers

Chris

[FlyingPenguin]

Do yourself a favor. Write a checklist with all the apps you need to install, and all the configurations you want to do, etc. Every time I do a clean OS install I pull up the last checklist and just edit it as needed.

I have a generic checklist I use for client clean installs as well.