Help! Hard Drive crapping out.

[Peaty]

My hard drive is failing on my year old Gateway PC. I get a boot error about hard drive trouble, and when (if) windows boots it will run very slow most of the time with some moments of OK running like now. Gateway is sending me a new HD to install but I was wondering if it were possible to save all the data on this HD and just transfer it to the new one? I do have an external HD that I back up all my critical data nightly but I really really don't want to have to reload all my apps, it will take forever. Do I have any good options? Should I just bite the bullet and reload everything? This Sux Peaty

Originally posted by Peaty
Do I have any good options? [edited for brevity] This Sux

Peaty

Hey Peaty,
Sorry to hear about the HD problems, that does sux, but, in earnest, you are ahead of the game if you have a backup solution.

Indeed, copy your data onto the external and make sure to dig around good to find any pockets of important stuff tucked away where you might not readily find it (bookmarks/favorites and stuff you saved to oddball directories).

Last, take note of any custom setup or settings you've done, like your internet connectivity, dialup info, tcp/ip settings ) Of course that includes a quick inventory of your 'aftermarket' hardware too.
[hey it's i-club alright!]

IMO you will undoubtedly have to bite the bullet and reload the apps (if not OS & apps!). That's not the worst thing in the world, in fact you can end up with a cleaner better running system. Take the time to patch up the operating system too (windowsupdate.microsoft.com) and check on patches for any of your software you're reinstalling.

Some parting thoughts:
In the future consider disk imaging software if you're really averse to having to rebuild your setup each time you are confronted with unformatted HD's.

Ah, one parting thought is, if Gateway doesn't care if you send the old HD back to them, just slave the failing disk and have a closer look at it to at least see if it's truly failing or just has some bad blocks in difficult places for the OS to deal with.

Good luck! PM me if you need any further info/help.

-tp

[Peaty]

Ah, one parting thought is, if Gateway doesn't care if you send the old HD back to them, just slave the failing disk and have a closer look at it to at least see if it's truly failing or just has some bad blocks in difficult places for the OS to deal with.

Thanks for the input, I appreciate it. I'm not positive but I think something is physically wrong with the HD. I did a disk diagnostic from a boot disk for the purpose and it failed the testing. When I can get it to run it runs OK for the most part. It will go through bouts of running slow like the drive is swapping. That shouldn't be the case though I have a Gig of RAM. I kept getting an error message just after it ran through the bios before the OS kicked in "Problem with the hard drive detected, consult trouble shooting in owners manual" The owners manual was no help of course.

Peaty

If the drive is still functioning use Drivecopy.

I've used it and it works.

http://www.powerquest.com/drivecopy/

Generally I will reload since Windows seems to degrade in performance over time, but as I said, I've used Drivecopy in the past.

[Peaty]

I've used drivecopy in the past but I'm not sure since the drive fails a diagnostic (I've tried a few different tests) if drivecopy will let me or not. I might give it a shot. Today and yesterday the it seems to be working well again. I'm just waiting for it to crap out again.