Computer Experts, I need a little advice

[JellyBeanGiant]

Heres the deal, my work computers harddrive seems to have an issue and I'm trying to figure out what I should do. What the harddrive does is while the computer is first detecting IDE devices on boot, it'll make a nasty screeching type noise, then the computer will say hard drive error. If I hit the reboot button and try again, it will boot, although sometimes it takes 3 or 4 times rebooting to get it to go. Once the computer gets past that initial IDE detection phase everything works fine, as if nothing was wrong. This has been going on for over a year now and it slowly is getting worse, making me press the reboot button more and more times before it boots (its up to 4-5 times each boot), and I know eventually I won't be able to boot at all, although that might be another year or so from now.

Normally I would just replace the harddrive and reinstall everything, but I have a bunch of specialty software on there that is a pain in the butt to install, requiring phone calls to get activation codes which it then verifies online that the codes haven't been used before, plus other annoyances for other software. Obviously this is what I'll end up doing if the harddrive dies, but I'd rather not deal with these hassels if I'm not forced to.

I was wondering if anyone has seen anything like this and might know if its a fixable problem, or if anyone knows of software that would allow me to copy this harddrive onto another one, including windows and all boot records and everything, so that I wouldn't have to reinstall all the software if I did replace the HD.

Thanks.

[GTODD]

just mirror the drive to another and you will be fine
oops didn't read far enough...hmmm brb

I have done it on 98 but not on any other os...

[GTODD]

what OS do you have?

[BanditWS6]

Yep, your hard drive is definitely about to fail. Two products that can mirror your entire drive (Windows installation and all) and then restore to a new drive are Norton Ghost and Acronis TrueImage. I have never done either, but the company I used to work for used Norton Ghost to restore OS installation images all the time and never had any trouble.

[Scott04GTO]

I'd say get a new computer, network them together and migrate all the software. That's what I'd try at least. But I'm no expert.

[Lothar]

Ghost or DriveImage.

You need to mirror that drive very soon.

[nixapatfan]

I'd say get a new computer, network them together and migrate all the software. That's what I'd try at least. But I'm no expert.

Nope not going to work. You can't migrate registry entries this way. Best option is to use Norton Ghost but you'll need a place to store the image (i.e. CDR/DVD-R, portable HDD etc.) and then restore the image on to your new drive.

[JellyBeanGiant]

Thanks, I'll check out Norton Ghost. To answer a few of the questions, its Windows XP, I have plenty of other computers around, but none with the same software on them, but it'll be easy to put the ghost image on them. And as nixapatfan said, just copying all the files over will not work.

[Spiydr]

I would personally go through the trouble of gathering all of the software that you would need to do a fresh install. I understand if you can not do it now, but in the future you WILL be in this same situation again, either due to a virus or bad hardware.

Once you have all the software on hand, then you want to setup all of your applications to store their data in a different place other then the harddrive that the applications are loaded on. After that all you have to do to protect yourself is perform regular backups of the harddrive that you have your data stored on.

This might be a bit of work up front, but once its done you will be able to bring your system back from a catastrophic failure in less than a day. Not to mention the peace of mind that you would have.

Good Luck

[Lothar]

Nope not going to work. You can't migrate registry entries this way. Best option is to use Norton Ghost but you'll need a place to store the image (i.e. CDR/DVD-R, portable HDD etc.) and then restore the image on to your new drive.

I thought you could boot from the Ghost CD and do this? I know DriveImage has a way to boot from CD to mirror two hard drives.

[MacDogg]

If you are advanced...do this.
Add a new Hard drive to the computer. Get the computer to boot. Go to MMC and open Drive Management.
Mirror the old drive to the new drive. After this completes, unplug the old drive, put the new drive in it's place. Go back to MMC and Drive management and break the mirror.

[nixapatfan]

I thought you could boot from the Ghost CD and do this? I know DriveImage has a way to boot from CD to mirror two hard drives.


:shiner: forgot about the mirroring option. Yes if you mirror then no need to save an image.

[Spiydr]

If you buy yourself a Western Digital harddrive, you can use their lifeguad tools to make an exact copy of your old drive to your new one.

Check it out here:
http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?swid=1

[rgwilder]

If you are advanced...do this.
Add a new Hard drive to the computer. Get the computer to boot. Go to MMC and open Drive Management.
Mirror the old drive to the new drive. After this completes, unplug the old drive, put the new drive in it's place. Go back to MMC and Drive management and break the mirror.
Yup, but just for fun be sure to :drink: first...

LOL

[teamgs]

Which flavor of XP do you have? I am fairly certain that XP Home doesn't support RAID 1 or 5 like XP Pro or W2k, due to the fact that it doesn't support Dynamic Disks. This will rule out mirroring, except with a RAID card. Correct me if I am wrong, as I have only software mirrored drives in NT4, W2K, and XP Pro, and haven't actually tried in XP Home.

Ghost, or any of the similar drive copy proggys will work fine, provided that there aren't too many errors on the drive.

BTW, I would first backup all your important data (pics, docs, mail store, etc.) in case the drive completely fails, or the copy goes horribly wrong.

Regards,

Gary

[JellyBeanGiant]

Well I stopped by Best Buy and picked up Norton Ghost and a 120 gig Seagate drive for $60 which is a decent price for the drive. I'll report back how things go.

[JellyBeanGiant]

Sweet, everything went perfectly. I installed the new drive, told Ghost to copy the old drive to the new drive, including the master boot record, then I disconnected the old drive and it booted up on the new drive as if nothing had changed, except now it boots on the first try every time.

Thanks for the help.

[rgwilder]

:wiggle: Glad all went well...

[teamgs]

Sweet!!! Glad it worked out! Now, don't forget to make REGULAR backups of your data.

Gary

[JellyBeanGiant]

Sweet!!! Glad it worked out! Now, don't forget to make REGULAR backups of your data.

Gary
I already do and have for some time, thats why I waited so long before finally doing something about this problem, I wasn't worried about losing any of my data.

[teamgs]

Good deal! You would be amazed at how many clients I deal with that don't back up their data.

Regards,

Gary