Replacing system disk drive

[NeilC]

My SATA hard drives are both knackered according to Speedfan - 850+ reallocated sectors and 0% Health. So I need to replace them ASAP.

I have both of them backed up on an external USB drive.

I'm wondering is there a way of being able to replace the system drive with a new one and transfer the old drive to it in such a way so I don't need to reinstall all my apps and their settings etc?

Both the drives that are on their way out are Maxtor drives. They seem to run fairly hot at c.50c. Is this a maxtor thing? Are other makes better at running cooler or staying healthy when hot

[Fronzel]

Get Norton Ghost.

Google tested 100,000 hard drives (http://216.239.37.132/papers/disk_failures.pdf) and found that there is little correlation between temperature, usage and failure.

[MortFurd]

My SATA hard drives are both knackered according to Speedfan - 850+ reallocated sectors and 0% Health. So I need to replace them ASAP.

I have both of them backed up on an external USB drive.

I'm wondering is there a way of being able to replace the system drive with a new one and transfer the old drive to it in such a way so I don't need to reinstall all my apps and their settings etc?

Both the drives that are on their way out are Maxtor drives. They seem to run fairly hot at c.50c. Is this a maxtor thing? Are other makes better at running cooler or staying healthy when hot
1. If you've got 850(!!!) reallocated sectors, I doubt your existing setup is salvageable. I've found plenty of PCs that don't boot or that run erratically because one sector died. If you were incredibly lucky, all of your bad sectors are in unused space and you might get away with it.
2. Ghost cando it, but if the filesystem is in anyway corrupted then copying will fail. Ghost doesn't like corrupted file systems.
3. I've read the google report. Good information. Single best indicator of failure is reallocated sectors. Temperature and other factors don't seem to make much difference.
4. Don't get Maxto drives again.

[e-sabbath]

Ghost has been getting worse and worse since 2003. Use Acronis TrueImage instead.

[Skibum]

Last time I bought a hard drive it came with an app to transfer the data for you. Worked rather well.

[NeilC]

Thanks people.

Any suggestions for a good replacement that won't break as quick, preferably not too hot or noisy?

I've been looking at Hitachi Deskstars and Western Digital Caviars - both OK? I'm wanting a 320GB SATA

[MortFurd]

Thanks people.

Any suggestions for a good replacement that won't break as quick, preferably not too hot or noisy?

I've been looking at Hitachi Deskstars and Western Digital Caviars - both OK? I'm wanting a 320GB SATA

I'm tending to WD these days. I see a lot of used drives, and WDs seem to hold the longest with the fewest errors - but, remember those are older drives; how they hold up doesn't say much about the newer models.

I have a co-worker who calls the Deskstar series "Deathstar." My only comment on that is that a brand new one quit after a couple of months of use while the other, older drives (not Deskstar) in the same drive cage quit. It was hotter than it ought to have been in there, by FAR. The other drives stood the heat, the Hitachi didn't.

[Bob Klase]

Ghost has been getting worse and worse since 2003. Use Acronis TrueImage instead.

I agree with that. I looked at Ghost in 2004 and went with Acronis TrueImage instead. While Ghost may have improved in the last 3 years I'm perfectly happy with TrueImage- and it's about $20 cheaper too.

[mhaze]

Nort Ghost

2o003 only-build dos config w/drivers, may have problem getting SaTa
in there

TI- if it works, it works great - try it

[This Guy]

I'm tending to WD these days. I see a lot of used drives, and WDs seem to hold the longest with the fewest errors - but, remember those are older drives; how they hold up doesn't say much about the newer models.

I have a co-worker who calls the Deskstar series "Deathstar." My only comment on that is that a brand new one quit after a couple of months of use while the other, older drives (not Deskstar) in the same drive cage quit. It was hotter than it ought to have been in there, by FAR. The other drives stood the heat, the Hitachi didn't.

I've been a WD fan since my 2nd hard drive (forget what size it was, but first was 32 MB Seagate that was a crappy RLL).

Iv'e had Seagate SCSII drives crash within a year.

I've got a 6GB WD drive that I've moved all over the place, and it's still running great. It's several years old, and has been in and out of my computers more times than I can count.

All that being said, I'm running two Seagate SATA 160 GBs now, and so far no problems. But they are only a few months old.

[Schneibster]

I've heard good things about Acronis. If you want to be a little more ambitious, a dd copy on Linux is a sector-for-sector copy of your hd, and if you have the old and the new on there at the same time, you can just pipe the data over and you're good to go.

As far as Hitachi vs. Caviar, I have two of each in the 250GB size range, and have only lost one drive- a Caviar in my wife's Vaio. Luckily I'd made her back it up, but she still lost some data. It died hard.

As far as heat goes, I am extremely suspicious of heat. I go out of my way to ensure that I have adequate fan coverage in all my boxes- but that Vaio, I never checked until I lost a drive, and found it had only one (other than the CPU coolers). I fixed that pretty quick, you can bet.

Our electronic friends hate heat; it pays to keep them cool. Watch out for dust collecting on the air intakes, too; it's worthwhile taking your system down and apart every year or so and taking a vacuum to it- go down to Fry's or whatever and get a set of technicians' vacuum wands and an adapter for your vacuum cleaner's hose. WATCH OUT FOR STATIC- moving air always makes it, particularly if it's dry. You need to be strapped and get the good wand set that's made of anti-static plastic.

I live in California (recently exited Washington state after a half-decade sojurn there), and have a vintage P90 with 64MB of memory and a 1GB hard disk that has never given me a day's trouble since I bought it new- and it's been on most of the time since I bought it. IMHO, heat is the most common cause of problems in electronics. I am anal-retentive about heat in my equipment, and I have a truly enormous amount of it: ten or so computers, five TiVOs, two complete stereo systems one of which is my home theater, and I'm a musician and use amps and recorders and computers for that, too. I have been able to trace the majority of failures I have ever seen to heat buildup problems, usually on a hot day, and usually on equipment without proper cooling, and often when air ducts or inlets were clogged with dust.

[stormer]

A free tool to make drive images is The Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows (http://www.ubcd4win.com/).

Download, make the CD, and use Drive Image XML (that is included with UBCD4Win) to make whateverimages of your drive.

Restore this image to the newly installed drive and you will have your computer exactly as present.

Note that DriveImage XML cannot install an image to a smaller drive than when it was made.

I have not tried Arconis, but UBCD4Win is definitely better than Ghost as a drive imager. Plus there are many other tools on the CD.

[NeilC]

With this "reallocated sector" thing - will I be taking problems to my new drive if I transfer a mirror of it?

[MortFurd]

With this "reallocated sector" thing - will I be taking problems to my new drive if I transfer a mirror of it?
"Reallocated sector" means that the drive had a sector go bad, and remapped all access to the bad sector to a good spare. It then copies the data from the bad sector to the new one. If this happens before your data is corrupted, then you are good. If the drive catches it too late, you get a corrupted file or file system.

Usually, the drive catches things before data gets lost. I've also had the first reallocated sector corrupt the file system to the point that the PC no longer boots.

As for copying things that way, best case you get a (some) corrupted files. worst case (like with Ghost) you get no copy because it can't untangle the file system enough to copy it.

I wouldn't count on having a usable system if you copy the existing system onto a new drive. I'd leave the old drive out of the system, and reinstall Windows and all the software on the new drive. Then I'd install the old drive in the system and copy all of my data onto the new drive.

[thrombus29]

I had a bunch of Maxtor 120G Sata's blow out on me last year(4 in a month if i remember) Now I am a WD man.

The Deathstar thing was from a when Hitachi were IBM drives and a huge lot of 60 and 75 Gig ATA drives had problems that let the head grind into the platter every now and then.