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Hard disk tick of death

Ninehigh - 26/11/13 at 11:34 AM

In fear that my hard drive is about to die I'm off to get a new one. Instead of reinstalling windows (yeah I know ) and then all the programs and basically taking a day out of my life to put it almost back where it was, is there any way I can just clone this drive while it's still good and do a physical swap without any messing about?

Daddylonglegs - 26/11/13 at 11:54 AM

Not used it myself, but you could try AOMEI Backupper. It is supposed to clone a complete drive so should take your boot sector as well.

[Edited on 26/11/13 by Daddylonglegs]

mookaloid - 26/11/13 at 11:55 AM

yes.

I have used one of these in the past to do exactly that. Apricor n cable etc

garyo - 26/11/13 at 12:06 PM

http://clonezilla.org/ is also a good/free one.

Smoking Frog - 26/11/13 at 02:28 PM

I always prefer a clean install as my pc always seems to run that bit faster without all the crap that you pick up over the months or years. It does take time, but if the install files (where possible) are on another partition or hard drive it's not so bad. The only draw back is you have to be doubly sure that you have a recent back-up to personal data and files.

Ninehigh - 30/11/13 at 11:07 AM

Well the noise it was making has stopped, which leads me to another question.. What are the early signs of hard drive failure?

David Jenkins - 30/11/13 at 01:36 PM

quote:
Originally posted by Ninehigh
What are the early signs of hard drive failure?

A ticking noise, that goes away?

Seriously - you have doubts about your hard drive so, as a minimum, you should be making backups of all files that are important to you NOW. This includes photos, documents, etc. Remember that the operating system and applications can be re-installed if the disk fails, but personal stuff cannot be replaced. I recommend that you write to CD or DVD all directories containing personal and irreplaceable stuff, and VERIFY that the write was OK to be sure that you've got the stuff saved (most disk writers can do verification if you ask).