Couple days ago my desktop has been a little 'noisy', thought it might be a fan that needed cleaning. Woke up this morning and system was down. Restarted and opened the case, 'ugly' noises coming from main hard drive, but it does still boot up, for how long who knows!

Current drive is 5 years old, I have a 6 month old 1TB drive in the 2nd bay used for photo back up.

Can I just transfer the contents of 'C' over to the new drive and use that as the primary/boot drive? Is there anything special that I need to do in the BIOS?

I plan to replace the 'bad' drive but would like to not have to reinstall all my programs and updates!

Thanks!!!

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you wont be able to just copy it over, you will need to use a program like Norton ghost but that will get rid of anything on the target drive.

IMHO the best option for you is to get your new drive and re setup windows. I resetup windows every year at least, its always good to have a clear out!

yep always a good idea to keep the OS on a different drive than the Data. If you lose 1 at least you didnt lose both.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

Some time ago, I've played around with Acronis True Image. It at least won't wipe out the target drive. There is (was) a trial version available.

Gruß,
Gundolf

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Computer sind nicht alles im Leben. (Kleiner Scherz)

SETI@home classic workunits 3,758
SETI@home classic CPU time 66,520 hours

Or else check out Magicdisk, which will also not wipe out the target drive. Or you could use a Linux partition editor or partition image program.

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Hmmm.... I like the idea of having the OS on one drive and data on the other (of course also backing up the data to another drive as well). I am going to backup my data now and order a new drive. I will run this one until the new one gets here, if it makes it that far. At least I will have the data I need. I guess I will just do a new install....

Now the question is if I am going to do a re-install do I upgrade to Windows 7!!!???? Running Vista now.

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. . . do I upgrade to Windows 7!!!???? Running Vista now.

Yes.

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Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

Thanks! Ordered a new 1TB drive, and Windows 7, both should be here in a couple days, hopefully the old drive will hold out that long! I unplugged the fans, hoping it might be one of them, no luck though, but wanted to be 100% sure. I hate reloading all the software, takes so LONG, especially with updates and all. Oh well, at least I can be thankful I caught it early and did not lose something important!

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What model of HD is your old one? I had a WD drive on my Dell, SATA, that was starting to go flaky, so I went to WD's site, and saw that they have Acronis True Image WD Edition available. I had gotten a Velociraptor drive a while back, so I thought this would be as good a time as any to use it. Downloaded and installed it, ran it, and it worked without a hitch. Cloned the drive perfectly, booted up right away with no issues. Not sure if it would work on your drive, but wanted to pass along what worked for me. Good luck!

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I just switched mine out last week. It is really easy and you will not have to reload any of your programs.

1)Buy the new hard drive
2)Put the new drive in one of the internal hard drive slots in the desktop (the old drive is in the other internal slot)
3)Format and partition the new drive.
4)Defrag and run anti-virus on the old drive.
5)You will need a software package that allows you to make an exact image your old drive to the new drive. I used Acronis True Image and was flawless and fast. It’s around $40.
6)Create a mirror image of your old drive onto the new drive.
7)Switch-out the old drive with the new drive.

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Original drive is a 250GB Maxtor, 5 years old now.
2nd drive is:
WD 1 TB, SATA 3 Gb/s, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM

New replacement drive is:
WD 1 TB, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 7200 RPM

I have been looking to upgrade to windows 7, this gives me a good excuse I guess! I figure I am eventually going to do the switch, why do this all over again in another year or so.

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Not sure how much you use the old drive, but it seems that you are on borrowed time at 5 years.

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Original drive is a 250GB Maxtor, 5 years old now.
2nd drive is:
WD 1 TB, SATA 3 Gb/s, 32 MB Cache, 7200 RPM

New replacement drive is:
WD 1 TB, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 7200 RPM

I have been looking to upgrade to windows 7, this gives me a good excuse I guess! I figure I am eventually going to do the switch, why do this all over again in another year or so.

It would be a good idea to partition the new drive into 2 (O/S & Data) & use your 2nd physical drive as a backup.

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I give Acronis my vote as well,
takes an image from your drive and transfers identical to new drive, even a bigger one, and ups the sizes of the partitions accordingly.
So many times it has got me out of trouble.
A simple boot from a cd is easy,
with the hard drive, that your image is on, connected.
It then copies your image to the new hard drive.
Instant fix :) and happy days again.
I religiously do an image once a month on all my pc's to an external usb hard drive.
A bloody nightmare if you have to reinstall windows, apps on a pc that is used for things other than boinc,
especially when some software requires activation.
I keep os, programs and data on 3 partitions on one drive for ease of cloning.
This is a personal choice.
On my main pc at home, data is kept on a raid 1 array.

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*** Those who know, don't speak,
those who speak, don't know ***

--[snip]--

I give Acronis my vote as well.

--[snip]--

Most (new) drives support S.M.A.R.T. (System Monitoring And Reporting Technology). Which, at least on my systems, reports if the Report is OK or BAD.
When I notice a BAD-Status, I quickly make an image or Back-Up, of that drive, specially when it keeps stating SMART-Status is BAD.(After each {Re}BOOT).
(Sometimes 'it' even refuses to BOOT, unless I press F1, stated by SMART)
After 'this message', it's in most cases, only a matter of time, when the drive
really gives out.

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Don't try to defragment the old drive. It's asking for trouble to start moving data around wholesale on a drive which is already giving problems. Get the image onto the new drive straight away and tidy it up there (defragment, virus scan) as necessary.

Ok - New drive and Windows 7 arrived today!

I am not going to 'image' over the bad drive, this is a good time to upgrade to 7, thanks for those options and info on how to do it though, maybe come in helpful in the future!

Since I have the 2 bays....

Can I install 7 onto the new drive in the 2nd bay and essentially run two OS, depending on which one I boot from?

I would like to do that for the short term, giving me time to load all my software back on the machine. Then eventually junk the old drive and put my in my 'real' second drive. Short term back-ups would be to my external drive.

Thanks!

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