How to replace dying boot drive?

[herokid]

My boot HD is slowly deteriorating, increasing bad sectors according to NDD. All my apps as well as WinME reside on this drive. I would like to transfer all to my second, larger drive temporarily; replace the bad drive; then (perhaps)transfer everything back. How can I do this with minimum effort?
I've heard some about PowerQuest DriveCopy (if I recall the name correctly). Is that the right tool, is there a better tool?
Any help would be appreciated.

[DrDoak]

buy a network card. find a friend with a big hard drive who also has a network card. buy a peer to peer cable (they're normally yellow) at compusa or bestbuy. link up. transfer your files to his comp. replace hard drive. transfer files back.

[Greg12]

What is the sitation of youre IDIE ribbons.

I wonder if it would be possible to set the old HDD has a slave and the new one as a master.

Then copy all the data from the old to the new, then take out the new.

[Nelson37]

If your drive is that bad, copy over DATA ONLY and reinstall windows and apps. Otherwise you'll be dealing with corrupted files. do copy internal, on seperate IDE channels so no drive compatibility issues. do not use GHOST or other mirroring program, these will copy the bad sectors to new drive. Re-install will probably run faster, anyway.

[alucard2050]

as far as copying your HD over i don't know but i recently had a drive going bad and alot of people told me it was a gonner. i did a low level format and i havn't had a problem with bad sectors since. might help if you want to save the drive. but i can't confirm the same will happen for you......

[herokid]

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On 2001-12-10 20:22:46, DrDoak wrote:
buy a network card. find a friend with a big hard drive who also has a network card. buy a peer to peer cable (they're normally yellow) at compusa or bestbuy. link up. transfer your files to his comp. replace hard drive. transfer files back.
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Don't see how that is going to help, sorry. Got my own network so I can move everything to another PC. Seems to me, as soon as I pull the drive, no op system, hence no anything including NIC back.

[herokid]

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On 2001-12-10 22:20:10, Nelson37 wrote:
If your drive is that bad, copy over DATA ONLY and reinstall windows and apps. Otherwise you'll be dealing with corrupted files. do copy internal, on seperate IDE channels so no drive compatibility issues. do not use GHOST or other mirroring program, these will copy the bad sectors to new drive. Re-install will probably run faster, anyway.
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Thanx for the info. What I'm hoping to do however, is to avoid the reinstall. Thinking there may be a way to, in effect, drag and drop the whole disk, reg and all, to a new boot drive. Hoping someone suggests an app to do just that. Seems like it should be an everyday problem for somebody.

[VCDsMakeMoney]

I had this problem.What I did is backup all my important stuff,mp3z,the .exe's of apps i have,other small stuff.I wrote down what I actually had on the drive.Once everything was backed up (sent everything to another,bigger drive),I Formatted and reinstalled the OS,then appz and other crap I had.Why avoid the format/reinstall,it will do wonders!

[ngnr]

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On 2001-12-11 04:29:00, herokid wrote:
<snip> Thinking there may be a way to, in effect, drag and drop the whole disk, reg and all, to a new boot drive. Hoping someone suggests an app to do just that....
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Nelson37 above mentioned Ghost (Norton) in a post above. It will definitely do the transfer to a new drive, OS/boot sector and all; I've done it twice myself and it works great. Just put your new drive in as a slave, Ghost your old drive to it and then reconfigure your new drive as master. When you boot back up, you'll have your OS on the new drive just like it was always there. Can't say for sure what effect the bad sectors will have though, if any.

[speedy]

If you still can hear your drive power up and spinning it could have simply drifted out of alignment. Many drives mark sectors bad that in fact are not. Unless your drive is years old and/or used to excess you may want to test it with SpinRite. http://grc.com/sroverview.htm I've used it for years and it saved my bacon several times.

Note: If you detest waiting hours for a video to render, don't bother going to the above site. Reading/repairing a sizeable hard drive takes many hours (at least over night) maybe days if you have a huge drive. Still it pulls things out the ashes no other software comes close to doing.

Worth a look anyways and the site is loaded with advice, check out the main page and be prepaired to be shocked if you're not up to speed on trojans, spyware and other evils of the Internet. Take the Shields Up test.

[Sir Kopelot]

U know i've been thinking how old exactly that drive is or should i put it this way is it worth keeping for you?Because HD's are designed to last you a looooong time, the low level format (someone mentioned it)is well worth trying , you may be surprized of its capabilities.Also i agree about the Ghost thats the easyest way to go, but....
But if u have any doubts about the drive beeing realy unfixable Before u use NGhost PLEASE BACK-UP just to be sure
I mean what whould it take to compress 2-3 cd's (ok 5-6)

Good luck on this endeavor

[herokid]

thanx all for the advice. As to the questions on the age of the drive - it's two years old and has been in 24/7 readwrite about 50% of the time. Does that make it old?

I'm still a little confused on the various backup advice. Yes I can image the drive to CDR or any other drive on my network. I need a working op system to 'unimage' per se to a new drive, right? I haven't used Ghost but know it creates a floppy and CDR's or presumably HDD space somwhere. Will the cpu boot from the Ghost floppy and allow me to rerstore to a replacement drive? Also, typically there are some Bios things that have to be done after sticking in a new drive. How do I take care of this with nothing but a Ghost floppy? Will a WinME boot floppy take care of that?
Anybody ever heard of this DriveCopy program I saw some info on in a Usenet thread? The PR on it seemed to be that it does exactly what I want to do (i.e. transport the entire drive, boot and all, to a different drive making the original dying drive superfluous). Seemd perfect for a lazy guy looking for a no risk solution.

[leera2]

Hello m8, Forget Drivecopy.. Norton Ghost is the best way to duplicate your drive. You simply select the drive/partition you want to copy and select the destination drive/partition. Hey presto instant copy. You can create a ghost image of your OS, and save it to cd. You need never do a os install again.

[ngnr]

herokid maybe I wasn't clear enough or maybe you didn't read my post thoroughly.

Install your new drive as a slave. Start Ghost and select your new slave drive as the image location. When complete, make your new drive the master and your old the slave (if you still intend keeping it) and you system will come up on your new drive just like it was still on the old drive. Then you can format your old drive. It's really very easy.

[herokid]

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On 2001-12-14 08:23:48, ngnr wrote:
herokid maybe I wasn't clear enough or maybe you didn't read my post thoroughly.

Install your new drive as a slave. Start Ghost and select your new slave drive as the image location. When complete, make your new drive the master and your old the slave (if you still intend keeping it) and you system will come up on your new drive just like it was still on the old drive. Then you can format your old drive. It's really very easy.
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Thanx. I did read your input and you did make it clear, any misunderstanding is between my ears. Can I ask you or anyone, how do I set the master slave drive assignment? Does Ghost image the operating system or the whole drive (anotherwords, do I have to handle installed and registered apps in some other manner)?

[ngnr]

Oops. I'm sorry I didn't see this post earlier so I hope you managed to figure it out by now. The master/slave setting is done by moving a jumper on the back of the hard drive itself. It will usually have "MA", "SL" or "CS", for Master, Slave or Cable Select.

Ghost will image the entire partition to the new partition on the new drive, including any apps and the OS. Just like making a digital photocopy. When done, it will be indistinguishable from the original drive.