Hi everyone, my hard drive is dying. At around the same time, there has been a sudden drop in system performance. All of a sudden, bootup takes much longer now than before. I've also noticed performance issues on video playback of certain WMV files and somewhat "jumpy" video and audio for certain games which had previously run flawlessly.

I assumed these problems are all a result of the dying hard drive, so I'm basically replacing the old 80GB Western Digital with a new 160GB Seagate drive. The old drive is my boot drive, so what's the easiest way to transfer all the data over (including games, applications, XP system files, etc.)? I'm hoping once the transfer is done, it will solve these performance issues.

Anyway, is cloning software the best way? Somebody mentioned "Cloning Maxx", and I also heard Seagate has their own program I could use as well. My concern is the partition sizes though - the hard drive sizes of the old and new are different. If I was to "clone" the old drive and copy it over to the new, will the different drive sizes cause problems?

If you got the Seagate drive new you should have a disk included that will do everything you need. Just put the new drive in as slave, or secondary if i t SATA, then put the software CD in the drive and boot from it. Choose the action to make the new drive your new master and follow the simple instructions.

If you didn't get the software with the drive you can download the .iso from Seagate and burn it to disk as an image. You can also download the software and install it on your old drive and run it from there.

One thing is don't stress the old drive any more than you absolutely have to. It may fail completely at any time.

I forgot to mention: what about defragging? I have two partitions currently on my old drive. According to the default XP defrag program, C: is fine, but D: needs to be defragged. Should I defrag before the transfer, after, or does it matter?

Since your new drive is larger than the old one I wouldn't worry about defragging. You only need to do that if the new drive is smaller. Defragging may be more stress than the old drive would be able to handle.

ok thanks...Seagate's Discwizard program worked perfectly (although it did take about 5 hours to finish the cloning process).