Cloning a Failing Hard Disk Drive

I've been asked to clone a "failing" hard disk drive on a WIndows XP PC. Can you recommend the best course of action. It seems to me that cloning a failing hard disk would or could transfer issues to the new drive. I'll be using Acronis 9 True Image. Thanks.

 

Well, I'd think that bad data is better than no data, so do the cloning. You can always clean up what data you can in the cloned copy. It won't hurt the new drive.

I don't see any way you can get 100% reliable data off the drive if it has already started to fail. What's gone is gone.

 

acronis true image
the cloning the client means is just to get data before it is lost or harder to recover.
failing drive will not export anything that will hurt a new drive
unless there is also virus and or trojons

 

Hi,
I find this one interesting. I'm annoyed that my PC takes a long time to start up. I'm running a P4 2.8 prescott @3.02Ghtz and have XP Pro with SP2. I've also got NSW 2005 Premier plus Webroot spy sweeper.
I've noticed that my 80 gig 'C'Drive has got a little noisier but I have a new 200Gig Hard drive. (Both are 7200 Maxtors.)
Could NSW be the culprit or is it that my 'C' Drive is rather old. (3 Yrs.)
If I want to copy my primary drive to my 2nd drive how do I do it. I don't want the hassle of activation both with Microsoft and Norton.
If I cloned it what program would you recommend?
Would I still have to re-install Win XP?
I'd be grateful for help on this issue from all you experts.
Regards

billo

 

It could be NSW. But if you haven't defragmented the drive recently, it could be that your drive heads are just doing a lot of unnecessary seeking to read files more recently added to the drive. That can make a drive noisier -- and slower.

Cloning the drive is probably the simplest way to go. If you bought a retail-box version of the drive, Maxtor will have provided a utility to do that unless their practice has changed in the last three years. Use Maxtor's utility -- they have a lot to lose by providing drive utilities that don't work properly.

If you bought a bare drive, you could use Norton Ghost, Acronis, or Partition Magic to do the job. Or others.

I don't see why that would be necessary -- the only thing that's changed is the drive you're booting from. Cloning a drive creates a byte-for-byte image on the new drive. So do the defrag first.

 

Thanks Rob for your valued opinion.
However, I've managed to sort it out myself using Acronis to clone my 'C' drive to 'D' then simply remove 'c' drive physically and reboot.
Now 'D' becomes 'C' and I re-install the old 'C' drive as a slave and it becomes 'D'.
Actually; I had de-fragged my drive before doing this.
To sum up: my PC still is slow to start so it must be Norton that's slowing it down. I'm thinking of dumping it and using a free AV.

Thanks again for your advice.http://forum.majorgeeks.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

http://forum.majorgeeks.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
Smile
Billo

 

You'll get no argument from me on that one. NAV is a pig for resources; NSW is worse. I dumped NAV earlier this year -- that was only one of the reasons I did so.