Several problems at once

I've got several problems going on at the same time and can't quite seem to get them figured out.

For one thing, I keep getting these stupid little pop up windows for smiley central, and other strange things. I've tried running the messenger disabling program I have 3 times. Either that isn't the problem or the program is not working right.

I'v gotten lots of bad SMART errors every time I boot up also so I have ordered a new drive that should be here MOn or Tues. Naturally, I will want to ghost everything over to the new drive.

If I do that, will I have to reinstall everything or will it think it is still in the same place as before?

And what are some good Freeware ghosting programs? I searched the forum and saw several mentioned. When I use a ghost program, which drive should it be on, the drive I ghost from or the drive I ghost too?

Most of the time my system isn't even seeing my second hard drive so I don't know if it is still working or not. My son says that some of his music is on that drive and Media Player finds and plays it with no problem.

This morning, I had to reboot and got several error messages. One was the bad SMART message again. It also said that my CPU ratio had been changed. Then it tried to boot from CD rather than the harddrive. It took 4 reboots before Windows came up.

I have run AdAware, Spybot, and AVG repeatedly and they come up clean.

 

Guess nobody has any suggestions for this problem. Tis a shame because my new drive just arrived today and I still don't have a ghost program to transfer everything over to it.

 

Can't speak from experience here as I've never done what you are about to. But if you use the advanced forum search (try keyword 'ghost') you should find plenty. Procedures will of course depend on which program you use. Read the 'read me' files. Have fun.

 

I did that search and downloaded HDCLONE. I need to find a small floppy before I can install it. Then I need to shut down and install the new drive. After I get everything switched over, then I can pick another problem and get rid of it without having to worry about the drive quitting on me in the middle of whatever I am doing. That would really be the pits.

now where did I hide those disks...........