Is my hard drive failing?

[navychop]

I offer $2.50 and the flat cat I saw on the side of the road yesterday.

Seriously. The OP can probably order a Haswell-based laptop with Win 7 on it since Win 8 is a dismal failure. Much easier to pick up a new WD 750 GB Scorpio Black and clone/expand the original 500 GB onto the new disk. The 750 GB are about $80 and the software can be had for free. I use the utilities on Ultimate Boot CD or Hiren's Boot CD. Both have the HD tools provided by the major drive manufacturers as well as tons of other diagnostic/repair tools.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

 

[avg1joe]

The OP can probably order a Haswell-based laptop with Win 7 on it since Win 8 is a dismal failure.

I'll give any of you $2 for a laptop with Windows 8 on it. I'll sweeten the deal by keeping the wretched cat and not making you take her.

I use the utilities on Ultimate Boot CD or Hiren's Boot CD.

I have a copy of Hiren's. Some of the tools on there seem like they shouldn't be free. Usually if someone gives you pay software for free, there is a danger of viruses or spyware coming along with it (pirating windows 7 for example). I think my copy comes with a version of XP that runs from the disk (that seems very illegitimate to me). For those of you who use Hiren's, do you worry about it infecting your computer?

 

[thomasjk]

Hiren's Boot CD is known Waerez.

 

[navychop]

I'll give any of you $2 for a laptop with Windows 8 on it. I'll sweeten the deal by keeping the wretched cat and not making you take her.......

I'll pay you $3 for a laptop WITHOUT Windows 8 on it!

 

[Gary Z]

Redo Back up is also good and free- it works well with Windows and Linux

http://redobackup.org/

 

[waylew]

I'll pay you $3 for a laptop WITHOUT Windows 8 on it!

I've got an old Zenith here with 3.1 on it

 

[CK SatGuy]

Well after formatting it back to factory settings, I'm still having the same problems so I just ordered a new WD hard drive from Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0037NYQ6Q/?tag=satell01-20

Now the next task will be cloning the current drive. I don't have any external hard drives so I was thinking of making a system image on a CD-RW. Would that work OK?

 

[thomasjk]

No. You can't create a Clone to a CD and you would spend most of your time swapping CDs. Better choice is to use the free WD utility http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119 to create an image on an EHD. Then restore the image to the new drive. The alternative is to put the current drive in an external enclosure, install the new drive in the laptop. Then clone from the external enclosure. to new drive. Reboot with the external enclosure disconnected. An external drive is really the best approach and afterwards you use it to save backup images of your laptop.

 

[navychop]

I've got an old Zenith here with 3.1 on it

Naw. Havta be at least 3.11!

THOSE were the days!

 

[CK SatGuy]

Well, it took a little while but I just finished a full disk backup on 64gb flash drive using the Acronis software. Now I just have to wait for the new hard drive to get here which it'll take about a week.

 

[avg1joe]

Was this the original drive? If you bought it, was it under warranty? I forget if WD gives you 3 or 5 years on retail drives.

 

[CK SatGuy]

Was this the original drive? If you bought it, was it under warranty? I forget if WD gives you 3 or 5 years on retail drives.

It was the original drive that came with the computer. WD doesn't warrant those directly so I would have had to gone through Acer which only gives a 1 year warranty and I'm way past that point. The new WD Blue drive I'm getting will have a 2 year warranty.

 

[CK SatGuy]

New drive came in today and I just finished installing it and recovering from the backup. So far everything's working fine.

 

[navychop]

Good to hear! Thanks for reporting back.