Help on impending disk failure.

Question

I need help minimizing the pain regarding replacing my boot drive.   Received diagnostic saying that disk failure was likely in near future.    I purchased a replacement drive.  Installed the new drive (80GB) as the secondary IDE drive. Initialized it partitioned as one large partition formatted as NTFS.   My old drive was/is a 60GB unit and was formatted as FAT32.   I would like to copy the current boot drive contents to the new drive and then swap the new drive to the primary drive.   Can someone tell me how to do this?    Obviously I'm trying to avoid reinstalling windows and all my software over again in what would be a very lengthy process.   Thanks in advance for the help.

ejn63 · Answer

Invest in a copy of Acronis True Image (about $35 from newegg.com).

ceri sheeran · Answer

Hi,

Check out the manufacturers web site.

Most hard drive manufacturers have software on their web sites that will allow you to do this.

Provided at least one of the hard drives is from that manufacturer.

Failing this then Symantec (Norton ) Ghost or Acronis True Image is the way to go.

hth

Ceri

DanielMorton · Answer

This disk I bougt was a 80GB dell branded I don't know who the manufacturer was.  Dell chat session told me I couldn't do what I was trying to do without reinstalling the operating system and my software from scratch.

DanielMorton · Answer

How would I proceed after buying the acronis software?

ejn63 · Answer

After installing TrueImage, make the rescue CD, boot the system from it with both drives connected, and clone the old drive to the new one. When done, shut down, remove the dying drive and connect only the new one (shut off the slave) and restart.

rickmktg · Answer

@DanielMorton wrote:

This disk I bougt was a 80GB dell branded I don't know who the manufacturer was. Dell chat session told me I couldn't do what I was trying to do without reinstalling the operating system and my software from scratch.

The manufacturer should be printed on the drive, or install Belarc's free advisor at www.belarc.com and see who the manufacturer is.

Storage, Drives & Media

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