HD going bad,not dead yet, clone? Image?

Riboflavin

I am working on a PC for a friend that the HD is going bad. It is slow and the BIOS warns us about the HD everytime it gets booted and we have to press a key to continue.

The have very little on it and I have backed up everything on it. They want a new PC because this one is a little older and I have ordered them one.

However, they have offered me the old one for free and I'd like to use it for a CHEAP MAME cabinet I'm contemplating.

My goal here is to not have to re-buy Windows to save me a buck.

The PC boots but is slow, it has so far not crashed so I assume the OS is still OK. Thunderbird will no longer open but I plan on deleting all apps and docs.

The Plan:

Place 2nd HD/SSD in as slave, image the pc, restore the image on HD 2, remove HD 1.

or

Clone HD1 to HD2 Remove HD1.

Is either of these easier? More likely to work with a flakey HD? Is it worth it to run chkdsk prior or is that more likely to make the drive worse?

Shadowfire

The HDD shouldn't matter too much, the windows key usually gets badged to the motherboard. And cloning from a failing hard drive is usually a headache waiting to happen. I'd throw the new hard drive in, install windows, and hope for the best. If it doesn't work, try cloning then. Windows installs really don't take much time anymore.

wunderbar

Yeah, You really don't have to worry about "saving" the windows install assuming it is Windows 10, which it should be at this point. Just install windows on a new hard drive and go from there. 90% of the time it'll just work. 9% of the time you'll have to go through internet activation, and 1% of the time you may have to do a phone activation where you have to say "yeah, same PC, hard drive just died"

Riboflavin

I left out the important information that they don't have their copy of windows and I don't see a sticker on the side. I guess I could download one of those programs that pulls the key. I also believe it is windows 8 if that matters.

**edit** one of their friends convinced them not to allow the upgrade when it was free because 10 was terrible or something. The PC is old enough where they lost anything that came with it.

wunderbar

The windows 10 upgrade is still free, Microsoft never disabled that, they just don't promote it anymore. So if you can pull the key, you *should* be able to install Windows 10 using the 8 key.

it's worth trying. windows 8 only has a couple years of support left anyway.

Shadowfire

And if you don't have the key available, you can pull it with produkey.