HDD Failing-Emergency Question

[falcon409]

I purchased a 1TB Seagate from Best Buy thinking I had lost the HDD last evening. . .it failed several boot attempts. I was able to get it back just now, but what I need to know. . .is can I do a full drive transfer to the new drive and save everything? I don't know how long this will continue to run, so any quick replies will be great. . .thanks!

Great, I just noticed that while on the bootup it located the newer drive, it doesn't show up in "My Computer". . .now what?

[VCN-1]

I have used this when I suffered a pending HD failure. 15 day trail period.

http://www.drive-image.com/


VCN-1

[guzler]

I purchased a 1TB Seagate from Best Buy thinking I had lost the HDD last evening. . .it failed several boot attempts. I was able to get it back just now, but what I need to know. . .is can I do a full drive transfer to the new drive and save everything? I don't know how long this will continue to run, so any quick replies will be great. . .thanks!

Great, I just noticed that while on the bootup it located the newer drive, it doesn't show up in "My Computer". . .now what?

I had this when I stuck a new drive in, you have to format it or something. I can't remember what I did, but I found it on the internet.

[roger-wilco-66]

[...]

Great, I just noticed that while on the bootup it located the newer drive, it doesn't show up in "My Computer". . .now what?

That's normal, you have to partition the disk first in the XP disk management, then you have to format the partition(s) (be sure to use ntfs)

---> http://www.theeldergeek.com/disk_management.htm


Cheers,
Mark

[MaddogK]

IIRC WD's drives ship with (or used to) an install disk that will do sector copies direct to the new drive. I've used them to copy from old drives to new WD drives and XP never suspected I copied it.

I copy drives with a hardware copier now but if you have a bootable second PC hook both the failing source and (NEW) destination drives to the secondary controller, and run the WD disk.

[falcon409]

This is a seagate 1TB drive, which did come with it's own Disk utility for setup. It said that it could provide the service necessary to "clone" the new drive, which according to the instructions, would make an exact copy of the old drive on the new drive.

I went with that, it ran the process, at the end of it, it said that I could now disconnect the old drive and reboot using the new drive. . .yea right. It never would boot entirely. It would get to the "Checking DMI Pool Data" and stop. I reconnected the bad drive, changed cables to make it the bootable drive, finally got it to boot one more time and what do ya know, when I checked the new disk. . .there was nothing on it. The disk utility hadn't done anything.

I'm currently using R-Drive as suggested above to copy everything from the old drive to the new one. Gee, only 5 more hours, lol.

[falcon409]

Ok folks, well. . .I am now working off a brand new 1TB harddrive. . .wooohooo, one whole terabyte that was reduced to 250gigabytes after the transfer process, LMAO. . .only I could pull something like this off. I told it to copy every just as it was from the old drive to the new drive and that's exactly what it did. Minus the failing drive, I have an exact duplicate of the old one. . .right down to the capacity. Geeeeze louise.:banghead::banghead:

[Gdavis101]

Depending on what program you used you should have been able to set it to so that all of the space would be made available on the newer drive. I know Norton Ghost has an option where you can set the size on the destination drive when going to a larger drive.

[dswo]

You are almost there. This page gives an overview of the whole process: http://lifehacker.com/5517688/how-to-upgrade-your-tiny-hard-drive-to-a-spacious-new-one-and-keep-your-data-intact. You just need to do the last step: "Expand the Partition." Go slow. Measure twice, cut once. But you already know that.

[falcon409]

I used R-Drive as noted above. I just assumed it would simply move everything over to the new drive, using whatever space it needed and the remaining would portion would still be available. I never guessed it would resize the dang drive. Now I've got to reformat and start over. . . .IF (and I haven't checked yet) it didn't simultaneously wipe the old drive clean. That would be just my luck.

[dswo]

No, no -- don't start over. You really are almost there. You just need to edit / resize the partition.

[wbuchart]

I just had to replace a seagate 1tb drive myself today.....2 months old.....thank goodnes for RAID.

[falcon409]

You are almost there. This page gives an overview of the whole process: http://lifehacker.com/5517688/how-to-upgrade-your-tiny-hard-drive-to-a-spacious-new-one-and-keep-your-data-intact. You just need to do the last step: "Expand the Partition." Go slow. Measure twice, cut once. But you already know that.
Ah yea. . .you da man David. . .814gig free. Thank you very much for the HU on that little article. No tellin' how much worse I could have made this by the end of the evening, lol. Thanks to everyone for the responses and VCN-1 for the link to R-Drive.:salute:

[MaddogK]

This is a seagate 1TB drive, which did come with it's own Disk utility for setup. It said that it could provide the service necessary to "clone" the new drive, which according to the instructions, would make an exact copy of the old drive on the new drive.

I went with that, it ran the process, at the end of it, it said that I could now disconnect the old drive and reboot using the new drive. . .yea right. It never would boot entirely. It would get to the "Checking DMI Pool Data" and stop. I reconnected the bad drive, changed cables to make it the bootable drive, finally got it to boot one more time and what do ya know, when I checked the new disk. . .there was nothing on it. The disk utility hadn't done anything.

I'm currently using R-Drive as suggested above to copy everything from the old drive to the new one. Gee, only 5 more hours, lol.

ahh, sounds like a corrupt boot sector. I'm glad you got it licked. I always set mine up as dual boot (don't know if it's possible with win 7) but when I get that error I boot off my EBD (emergency boot diskette), run 'fdisk /mbr' and like magic problem vanishes.

[falcon409]

I just had to replace a seagate 1tb drive myself today.....2 months old.....thank goodnes for RAID.
Gee, thanks for that wbuchart, lol, lol. Gives me something to look forward to, lol.

[Dangerousdave26]

Well you are going to hate me in a few seconds.

In January I bought a new laptop with a Seagate Momentus 500GB hard drive.

9 days later the hard drive blew up.

Best Buy exchanged the laptop because it was under 14 days. So I set up my new laptop and 30 days later the hard drive blew up.

This time I contacted ASUS and they sent me another Seagate 500 GB hard drive. While it was enroute I did some research and found out that Seagate Momentus drives have been having a high failure rate. I saw one post in a review that stated the problem started when Maxtor bought them. Which I did not know had happened.

I got my next Seagate hard drive and it is still in the package. I placed my image on it and ran it a few days then I went out and bought a Western Digital 750 GB Scorpio Blue.

I installed my image on it and all has been good.

I am using Macrium Reflect to image the Drive. http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

I suggest you create an image of your drive now because waiting until the last minute might be the wrong thing to do.

It really does not matter who's software you use but I trust Macrium now. It has saved me twice.

[falcon409]

Thanks Dave. . .I just completed the image backup. The drive I purchased was a "Barracuda". As of January of last year it was experiencing a 40% fail rate, lol. The problem apparently was in the firmware, which it seems Seagate took their good sweet time correcting. The model and firmware version I purchased obviously is not the same, but given what I'm reading about Seagate, it may not make any difference. I'm definitely keeping the box and receipt close by.

Unfortunately you buy what you can afford in many cases and you also buy from a local establishment rather than online or driving 50 miles to a bigger city to try. It's close, it can be returned (normally) and replaced immediately and it didn't cost you more in gas than the drive costs to get what you needed.