Problem: Impending HD failure Reaction: Please Odin No! Solution: Cloning?

An elderly friend who is wired to his current 32 bit set up, a PC running Win 7, got a notification from his operating system that something was wrong with his hard drive and that he should back up his data.

I have backed up the data using "Easy File Transfer". It is now copied to an external drive.

I'm wondering if I would be able to clone the ailing drive. The hope would be that after cloning it to a new HD the computer, new HD installed, would boot up and look exactly the same as what he is used to, including all apps and settings, desktop wall paper, everything.

Can that be done and if so, how?

All help appreciated as usual.

Absolutely
Just got through cloning a 1 tb drive to a 4
OS drive at that

However , there is probably some corrupt data on that original drive
Worth a try

All one does is download a clone software
I use Seagate
Install the software
Shut down
Install the new drive
Boot back up
Run the software (usually disk to disk clone)
Cross fingers
Shut down
Pull the original drive
Put the new drive in the original's place
Cross fingers
Boot up

a reply to: Gothmog

How did you do it? I did install Symantec Ghost (2007) onto the old HD, but I'm not sure that is the right way to do this. Should Ghost be burned to a CD? I'm very sketchy on the details of this procedure.

Thanks. I appreciate the help. The edit is clear. I'll get going on it.

originally posted by: ipsedixit
a reply to: Gothmog

How did you do it? I did install Symantec Ghost onto the old HD, but I'm not sure that is the right way to do this. Should Ghost be burned to a CD? I'm very sketchy on the details of this procedure.

I edited my post
Use Seagate .It is free, faster ,etc
This process ABSOLUTELY has to be done on that particular system
No other

a reply to: Gothmog

OK, got it. Thanks.

One thing I forgot
If you get disk reads while cloning , choose Ignore All
There is no other choice at that point , anyway
It works or it doesnt

originally posted by: Gothmog

originally posted by: ipsedixit
a reply to: Gothmog

How did you do it? I did install Symantec Ghost onto the old HD, but I'm not sure that is the right way to do this. Should Ghost be burned to a CD? I'm very sketchy on the details of this procedure.

...
This process ABSOLUTELY has to be done on that particular system
No other

^^^^THIS!!^^^^

Because, if you don't, all the registry / device / port mapping will be wrong. Even with this there is an element of "cross your fingers" as Goth noted.

OK. Got it. Thanks to both.

I'm preparing to sacrifice a bullock now. (Humor.)

a reply to: ipsedixit

Expect "some" problems afterwards. Usually minor stuff which is fairly easily fixed.

Go looking for them before you leave. Better to fix them right then while you've still got the unit up right after you did it than to cycle it and have it morph yet again.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk


10-4.

a reply to: ipsedixit

Yes absolutely.

You will need the following.

Clonezilla clonezilla.org... You have the option of burning the iso to a cd or create a bootable usb thumb drive.
gparted. gparted.org... as with clonezilla. you have the option of cd or usb thumb drive.
An external usb hard drive. This needs to be larger than the size of the current hard drive.
New hard drive.

So you will want to do the following. Attach the the usb hard drive to the pc. Boot up the pc via the clonezilla cd or usb thumb drive. Use clonezilla to backup the drive to the usb hard drive.

Once this is done. Take out the old drive then install the new one. Boot up the computer using clonezilla then restore the image from the usb hard drive to the new drive.

Assuming that the drive is bigger than the old one. You will want to next use gparted to resize the drive partition to the full size of the drive.

If you run into any problems there are tutorials online that will guide you. Good luck.

a reply to: grey580

Thanks. I've been trying the Seagate route but ran into a different problem. The drive I want to clone "to" is not showing up on my desktop. The computer sees it enough to install a driver for it, but then I can't see it listed among the other drives.

a reply to: ipsedixit

Normally I clone the drive while it's still in the pc. And not outside. I'm sure that it's possible. But I'd think it would be easier to just clone it while it's in the computer. Then restore the image to the new drive.

I've attached a youtube video that shows you the process. Maybe you can select the second drive in the clonezilla disk list, that you want to clone.

Create a backup windows disc image in windows 7 depending on size of the image you can backup the image to dvd's or another portable drive. Install new hard drive, then windows 7 on it. After installing windows 7 use your disc image in windows recovery, and you should all good.

a reply to: ipsedixit

I occasionally backup the entire C drive and everything else....but as someone said....you'll be dragging pups, Phish, worms, corrupt files somewhere in there as well.

MS has also stated no more help or support soon for Win 7....

What i offered to help above is exactly what you need to do according to what you wanted to do, seriously try this before any of the recommendations above. It's the easiest way and will do exactly as you mentioned you needed.

As things stand now, I am proceeding with the cloning using Seagate's Disk Wizard utility at Gothmog's suggestion. I had started on that before some of the other replies came in, so I wanted to see if I could get there by that route.

A problem was that the new hard drive did not show up among the storage disks on the computer, but a little googling revealed that the drive needed to be initialized using the Disk Management utility in Win 7. After being initialized, Disk Wizard could see it and I was able to proceed with the cloning operation.

When it finishes I'll let everyone know how things turned out.

Well good luck. Remember windows 7 disc image in the future. It has saved me many times. Had the same issue with a HD losing sectors. Defraggler showed the sector errors plus windows would remind me. So I did as I mentioned above and everything was the same when I did this method. Another time I was messing with a driver update software and it screwed up my system royally. I use my system image and it was right back to normal.

So in short I always keep a windows system image backup on a external drive. And update it every couple months or so.

Hope this helps.

a reply to: ipsedixit

If you don't have luck.

Try going the clonezilla way.

You won't have to initialize disks. Clonezilla will see the drive and you will be able to copy the image from the external onto the new drive.

You are speaking of partition and format
I had just gotten off from work and needed a good "nights" rest , or I would have probably given a better walkthrough
But , you did learn of Windows Disk Management and that is a good thing
Learn as you go

Now , once the disk is cloned and all is well , there is one more step
You want to run checkdisk on the new drive after cloning .
Why ?
You had bad sectors on the other drive and potential corruption
Now that the data is on a "healthy" drive , the bad sectors (hardware) are now bad blocks (software) and checkdisk may well be able to repair
This is optional