Help-failing HD

[Gibblet]

have a seagate 120gb C: drive that's goin rapidly. It's the one that I have my OS on, and thanks to Joel I froze it last night and saved most of everything. Thanks Joel! It's working today- but I was rechecking a torrent using bittornado 3.17- and it too 30mins to check. I basically cleaned my other drive up enough to move files into it. I'm gettin the blue screen of death when I reboot. It's startin to wine alot and sounds like me snorin, A lot of the program files I use(CDR Label, DVD decryptor, etc) Idon't have exe files for. So- How do I put everything into a new drive, I'm lost here. I am making space into mf F: drive, which is 500gb, to make the switch- but I have no clue, and very litte$- any help is appreciated, thanks- John

[mooncusser]

If the drive is going, you'll want to get all of your personal files off it ASAP. That means pictures, music, documents, spreadsheets, etc.

You can't just move applications from one drive to another, most won't work that way. They typically need to be reinstalled to a new location. Part of it has to do with components installed into Windows, into the Windows Registry and often components that the program sets up in its own folders.

And when it comes to Windows, you'll probably have to reinstall it from scratch on a new drive - which means installing applications anyway.

If it was me, I'd focus on saving the files you can't replace and that have personal information you need. If it can be downloaded (torrents) or reinstalled (applications) you can let them go.

And if you have to freeze the drive to get it to work, I'd be really concerned about possible corruption of data even if it does spin up and let you get in.

[August West]

Technically it is possible (although difficult) to move everything to another drive with something like ghost, but you are going to have a lot of issues. Possibly a whole lot, since you're going away from the C drive, ect. Your boot.ini will not find the O/S for one thing. (Meaning your hardware will be unable to see the "new" O/S. Mooncusser is right in what he says, get everything off of there now. And its going to be much easier for you to get a new drive, reinstall everything, track down copies of all the apps you use, etc, than it will be to try and use these 3rd party utilities to migrate to another drive. Plus you've got to pay for the utilities, figure them out, plus the drive might totally die during the imaging process, blah-b;ah-yada-yada.

[Gibblet]

Nice pic August West. I've managed to buy some time by moving everything I could to my other drive, and dumping all the data to discs. I ran a seagate utilitie software, and it didn't find any corruption, and my new drive is only 1 year old. I also don't get the blue screen any more, evrything works. When I get mo money I'll replace the OS. Thanks for theinput folks! John

[August West]

Thanks, I snagged it off Zane Kesey myspace page I think.

Another option (now that I've stewed on it a bit): if there is room to image your entire C drive over to your other drive is to get Norton ghost, ghost the image of your C drive over and use Ghost to create a ghost boot disk. Get another hard drive like the one that failed. Replace the failing drive. Boot to the Ghost boot floppy and use it to grab the image off the other hard drive and viola!

Its been years since I've done this, so you may not need an identical drive, but I do remember this process being pretty intuitive. It will most likely find the image by default and ask "Is this the one you want to install?" Thing is, if that hard drive is making noises, its going to blow. Sort of like once your motor starts blowing oil, its never going to not blow oil. Ghost id pretty cheap I believe, and you can get new parts for cheap on ebay. They'll be OK if the seller has a whole bunch of sales. I got most of the parts for my PC that way and saved a ton.

[August West]

At first I misread your original question and thought you wanted to move everything to a different drive in the existing setup as opposed to duplicating your current setup with a different drive in place of the C drive. So thats the reason for the post above re:Ghost, that would work.