Hard drive help! Please read ... I'm freaking out!

[Skinny Viking]

Hey everyone

ok I have a potential problem and need some help. My pc has 2 internal drives, one is my system and the other where I record to. Recently (past 3 days) I've been experiencing some weird shit going on during bootup and I've seen a little message saying my system drive may be going bad. Now I'm not very good with the hardware end of things so I just wanted to know if this made sense to do. I was gonna get a new hard drive, disconnect my secondary drive where my PT sessions and all are, hook up the new drive where that was, and then use something like Norton Ghost or Casper to clone my system drive over to my new one. After that I would then disconnect the bad drive and swap it with the cloned new drive. THEN, reconnect my other good drive with all my PT sessions back to its original place.

My question is, does this make sense, will it work? I won't lose anything by disconnecting my secondary drive will I? Of course I intend to make backups of the sessions and audio files in there but is there anything I am not thinking of? Any recommendations for software to use for this would be appreciated as well .. like I said, I was gonna try Norton Ghost or Casper, both of which SEEM to say they do exactly what I'm hoping to do. Any info & insight would be really helpful. Thanks!

Cheers!

 

[everybody's x]

yes it will work if the drive isnt completely fucked up

you are on borrowed time, do it now


when handling hard drives be very careful about static electricity, I bricked my entire life's recordings (personal recordings) in .000003 miliseconds once

 

[Baron of Norsworthy]

Hey everyone

ok I have a potential problem and need some help. My pc has 2 internal drives, one is my system and the other where I record to. Recently (past 3 days) I've been experiencing some weird shit going on during bootup and I've seen a little message saying my system drive may be going bad. Now I'm not very good with the hardware end of things so I just wanted to know if this made sense to do. I was gonna get a new hard drive, disconnect my secondary drive where my PT sessions and all are, hook up the new drive where that was, and then use something like Norton Ghost or Casper to clone my system drive over to my new one. After that I would then disconnect the bad drive and swap it with the cloned new drive. THEN, reconnect my other good drive with all my PT sessions back to its original place.

My question is, does this make sense, will it work? I won't lose anything by disconnecting my secondary drive will I? Of course I intend to make backups of the sessions and audio files in there but is there anything I am not thinking of? Any recommendations for software to use for this would be appreciated as well .. like I said, I was gonna try Norton Ghost or Casper, both of which SEEM to say they do exactly what I'm hoping to do. Any info & insight would be really helpful. Thanks!

Cheers!

Just make sure you don't change the jumper settings and I would suggest that you consider buying a hardrive caddy.

 

[JBroll]

Don't pay fucking money for a bit-for-bit clone. If a new HD doesn't come with a disk clone utility, PM me and I'll walk you through it with free stuff.

Jeff

 

[Skinny Viking]

Hey guys!

Thank you very much for the advice ... The caddy is not a bad idea at all and @JBroll - I absolutely will PM if it doesn't come with some type of software, thanks man. I'll probably just be getting another WD and I believe they usually come with some kind of drive to drive software. Go figure, right when I was about to upgrade my recording drive. Should have the new drive tonight, see what happens

Cheers and thanks again!

 

[kev]

Yep no problem at all, plenty of free drive clone softwares about, google!

 

[Damian B]

I would download Hiren's Boot CD

It's a collection of tech tools that I use every day at work. It has clone utilities, partition utilities, hard drive testing utilities, DOS, NTFS utilities, etc etc etc. I seriously don't know what I would do without it. Just download the ISO, burn it and then boot from the CD.

I would try to ghost using Norton Ghost first, I generally have the most luck with that one. If it gives you bad sector errors, you can tell it to ignore them in the options, or you can run a program called HD Regenerator 1.5. It moves data from bad sectors to good sectors so that you can clone it or move the data over later. It takes like 5 hours to run, but it's worth it if you've got a drive with really important info (which you probably do).

Anyways, good luck, PM me for more help if you need it, I do this every day!

 

[Skinny Viking]

when I ran my WD diagnostic tool it said the drive that is giving me problems only failed one of its tests ... something about the raw read error rate. I have no fucking clue what that is but its in red and I know red = bad bad bad

said the value was like 200 or something if that makes sense to anyone (which I'm sure I'm the only one it doesn't make sense to)

anyways, looking into the extra software ... thanks for the tips Sphykik and like I said, I'll give it all a shot tonight or tomorrow and hit one of you guys up if I run into any problems ... thanks again guys!

Cheers!