Replacing a Hard Drive-Cloning

captaink

I have decided to replace my hard drive. It's doing some things that really worry me, and I want to get a new one before it is too late.

Since this will be a straight replacement, cloning the drive seems like a good option. Is there a 'best' cloning program to use? Also, once it is cloned, I just swap them, and it's like I have the exact same drive, right? Will there be any fiddling with the BIOS or my Windows install?

I have a 640 GB HD currently, apparently that size isn't too popular anymore. I'll probably bump up to 1 TB. Looking at these.

Just out of curiosity, why do the prices have such a wide spread. As far as I can see, all the specs match up (size, transfer rate, cache), so why are there variations of $100 or more for similar, same-manufacturer drives?

Synthesis

I direct you to my first post at this forums, it may help you. Certainly helped me (or rather, my dad).

tl;dr--Acronis True Image works well and does exactly what you're describing. Or at least, it did way back when.

Burtletoy

captaink wrote:

I have decided to replace my hard drive. It's doing some things that really worry me, and I want to get a new one before it is too late.

Since this will be a straight replacement, cloning the drive seems like a good option. Is there a 'best' cloning program to use? Also, once it is cloned, I just swap them, and it's like I have the exact same drive, right? Will there be any fiddling with the BIOS or my Windows install?

I have a 640 GB HD currently, apparently that size isn't too popular anymore. I'll probably bump up to 1 TB. Looking at these.

Just out of curiosity, why do the prices have such a wide spread. As far as I can see, all the specs match up (size, transfer rate, cache), so why are there variations of $100 or more for similar, same-manufacturer drives?

That is a lot of money for a $50 dollar HDD.

I would wait for as long as possible to pick up a new HDD, in hopes that the prices return to normal.

Foomy

if you can wait about 6 months to get a new drive I really suggest doing it.

prices are 2-3x what they should be, and it'll take some time for prices to recover after the Thailand floods.

Tef

Yep, I'm in agreeance that holding off from buying a new HDD at the moment is a good idea. As for the changes in price, it's hard to say unless you provide links to the products. Generally the important features that effect price are capacity, cache size and RPM of the spindle. Don't worry about if it's SATA II or III, as no current mechanical drive can saturate even a SATA II connection.

captaink

I'm not really sure I can trust my drive to last 6 months, unfortunately.

Stormwatcher

Thread hijack:
I had windows running from a small partition within a 1TB HDD, and I cloned it to a separate 120GB HDD. Then I made several mistakes, and ended up formatting the 120 GB drive, thinking it was the other partition, and later deleted the other partition and "grew" the bigger partition to the full 1TB. I ended up killing both windows installs, including the PROGRAM DATA folder... Now I need to recover the data from the small partition in the 1TB drive. I had to use the 120 GB one to install windows, which is now working, but I need that Program Data/App Data folder, too much game data in there. I haven't written a single file to the drive, so the bytes should all be there.

I'm trying Recuva and Pareto Logic, but they find 1 million files, none the ones I need.
I tried testdisk on Linux, no help either.

Is there anything else I could do?

schmads

I used EASEUS Data Recover Wizard Pro 3.0 (http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/) the last time that I managed to completely screw up partitions and still wanted to recover files. I have no idea if it is any better than the programs you mentioned, I just know that it worked for me when I used it a few years ago. It wasn't cheap, but it looks like there is now a "free edition" that recovers 1GB for free. That might be enough to get your files, or at least to find out if it's worth buying it to get your files.

In response to the OP/cloning part of the thread, I have also used Acronis True Image (2011 in particular) to clone many different hard drives (and individual partitions when the drives themselves weren't being replaced, but data was being moved around) on many different systems. It has never failed me. They have frequent sales, so if you end up deciding to get it, I recommend that you Google around and see if you can find a coupon code or something like that.

captaink

How about this hard drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136934
It's $125 after coupon. Good deal?

Foomy

captaink wrote:

How about this hard drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136934
It's $125 after coupon. Good deal?

It's a good drive, but that particular sale is for refurbished models. not sure how much i'd trust a used hdd. especially with it only getting a 90d warranty compared to the 2-3 years on a new drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136767 might be a better option.

captaink

I got the HD in the mail today. I'm wondering, is this a good time to reinstall Windows?

I could install it to the new hard drive, then copy all the rest of my files and folders over. Or is it a better idea to just image it? I worry that is this hard drive is bad somewhere, then imaging it may copy the bad spots. Or is that not an actual problem?

captaink

Also acronis looks really good, but I don't really want to pay $50 for something I plan to use once.

bowen

http://clonezilla.org/

Has worked absolutely fine for me. And it's free.

captaink

I found this:
http://www.xxclone.com/index.htm

Which looks like exactly what I want.

Another request! I basically want to clone my old HD to my new one. If that works, I want to wipe the old one, and use it for backup. I think I can trust it with backups and stuff that isn't going to be accessed often.
Is there a freeware or cheap application to periodically back up files in specified folders? I'd like to be able to designate C:\My Music, for example, to be backed up once per day or week or whatever.

Thanks for the advice folks, even if I appear to be ignoring a lot of it :P

captaink

It appears to have worked. This is spooky. It asked for my windows disk the first time I tried to boot from it. So I went and found it, and was going to use it, but didn't hit a key in time so it booted from the hard disk again. That time it worked. I guess I am booting from E:\ now? It's so unsettling!

Turbotax will start now, without grinding my PC to a halt. So it looks like I fixed my problems.

Edit: It was so sneaky I didn't realize I was still booting from the old hard drive. I had to disconnect the old one to get it to boot from the new one. New one is definitely louder

LaPuzza

I'm considering adding a SDD to put games on - my HD is the only weak link on an otherwise solid PC. Will that work, or will the OS being on the old, slow drive mean that the SDD won't do me any good?

Thanks.

Synthesis

Wouldn't it really speed up loading for whatever games you had on the drive, but not help anywhere else? I mean, a lot of people advocate using SSDs just for your OS for that reason. Honestly, that's what keeps me from investing in an SSD. It'd mean paying a small fortune to get four or five games running faster, and nothing else. Funny enough, this reason was also true four years ago--game software real estate demands are rising faster than SSD sizes.

captaink wrote:

It appears to have worked. This is spooky. It asked for my windows disk the first time I tried to boot from it. So I went and found it, and was going to use it, but didn't hit a key in time so it booted from the hard disk again. That time it worked. I guess I am booting from E:\ now? It's so unsettling!

Turbotax will start now, without grinding my PC to a halt. So it looks like I fixed my problems.

Edit: It was so sneaky I didn't realize I was still booting from the old hard drive. I had to disconnect the old one to get it to boot from the new one. New one is definitely louder

I was about to say, if you're booting from E, I think that would require you still have another drive sitting in there. But drive letter assignments, when not assigned yourself, always confused me.

bowen

If you've got the space to spare on an SSD, putting any application on it will speed it up.

For instance, if you put world of warcraft on it, the usual 45 second load time turns into 10.

Mr.Ritz

WD comes with free cloning software that works fine.