[Tolkien]

Hi
My hard drive has been showing signs that it may be on the way out, it has been making intermittent clicking noises and scandisk is reporting bad sectors. I'm told this is a sure sign that the drive is faulty and seeing as hard drives aren't terribly expensive these days I think it would be better to replace it ASAP rather than wait for it to fail completely.
I want to replace it with an identical drive (Seagate 120GB 7200RPM), and would like if possible to copy over the entire contents to my new drive.
The other alternative is to install everything clean into the new drive, which seems to me to be terribly time consuming, but as everything seemed to work well before this problem my preferred option is to just copy everything over.
My question (well two questions really) are:

A: Is it advisable to copy the contents from the faulty drive to the new drive, are there any problems with doing it this way?

B: How do I go about it? The way I envisage doing it is connecting the new drive to the same IDE as the old drive, then booting up and just copying and pasting the entire contents from the old drive to the new drive. After that shut down and remove the old drive, connect the new drive and boot up. Is it as simple as that or am I missing something?

Thanks in advance for any advice anyone can give me on this matter.

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It is that simple. You will have to set the new drive as master with slave
and the old drive as slave. There should be a jumper setting map on the drive. You will have to install windows 1st on the new drive and then copy and paste the folders you want. Make sure your computer is plugged in to a grounded power supply
and touch your self on some metal to get rid of any static. Static is a big killer of drives
and mother boards

Edited by peterm, 09 July 2005 - 09:11 PM.

[peterm]

It is that simple. You will have to set the new drive as master with slave
and the old drive as slave. There should be a jumper setting map on the drive. You will have to install windows 1st on the new drive and then copy and paste the folders you want. Make sure your computer is plugged in to a grounded power supply
and touch your self on some metal to get rid of any static. Static is a big killer of drives
and mother boards

Edited by peterm, 09 July 2005 - 09:11 PM.

[peterm]

do you have the model number of the drive?

[Tyger]

If you buy a new drive it may include software to "clone" or identicaly copy your old hard drive to the new one. If it's good software it will give you a list of the corrupt files so you can replace them. This way you don't lose your programs or settings. But not good if your old drive has malware problems. This is also often the easiest on the old drive. In the worst case situation you would want to install the software on another computer, or at least another hard drive with an operating system, put both your old and new disks in and copy the image of the old onto the new.

In answer to your (b) question, no you can't just copy and paste, you need to run "drive to drive copy" or drive image copy software.

Edited by Tyger, 09 July 2005 - 10:29 PM.

[Tolkien]

do you have the model number of the drive?

Thanks guys for the prompt replies
The drive is a Seagate Barracuda ST3120022A.

Just an update on some things I tried, I went to Seagate's website and ran a test program there called Seatools, I ran a thorough test on the drive and it came up with no errors, but another test that checks SMART status (whatever that is) found some errors.
I then ran CHKDSK at startup to see what it would come up with and to see if it might attempt to repair the errors, and the following happened. It ran through the first 3 stages fine, then when it got to Verifying File Data (stage 4 of 5) it took almost 2 hours to get to 41%, is this normal? In any case I needed to use the computer and couldn't wait another 2 hours + for it to finish, so I rebooted and came here to see if there were any replies, I plan to run CHKDSK again later when I don't need the computer.
At this stage I'm trying a few things to see if the drive is really beyond help before deciding if it needs replacing. The noises I hear are at start up and sometimes when playing EverQuest 2, a fairly graphics intensive game. The noise I can best describe as a clicking sound, which varies from maybe one click every 30 seconds to one click every 3 or 4 seconds. As I said in my original post I've read that this is a sure sign that the drive is going bad, if that is so I'll go out and get a new drive tomorrow, I just want to make sure first I'm not wasting my money.
Thanks again for the quick replies and thanks in advance for any further help you may be able to offer

[peterm]

3.3 Jumper settings
3.3.1 Master/slave configuration
The options jumper block shown in Figure 1 is used to configure the drive for operation. It is the 8-pin dual
header between the interface connector and the power connector. Use the following settings to configure the
drive as a master or a slave.
Master or single drive. The drive is configured at the factory for a master or single-drive operation with a
jumper set on pins 7 and 8.
Drive as slave. Remove all jumpers.
Drive as master with a non-ATA-compatible slave.
Use this jumper setting only if the drive does not work as a master with no jumpers installed.
Figure 1. Master/slave jumper settings
3.3.2 Cable-select option
Computers that use cable select determine the master and slave drives by selecting or deselecting pin 28,
CSEL, on the interface bus. Master and slave drives are determined by their physical position on the cable. To
enable cable select, set a jumper on pins 5 and 6 as shown in Figure 1. Refer to your computer manual to
determine whether your computer supports this option.
3.3.3 Alternate capacity jumper
Some older computers may “hang” at startup if their BIOS detects a disc drive with a capacity greater than 32
Gbytes. This limits the drive’s capacity to 32 Gbytes when the alternate capacity jumper is used. To access the
full capacity of the drive, you can:
• Update the BIOS
• Use third-party software such as DiscWizard™ or Disk Manager
• Use a third-party host adapter
For drives with capacities greater than 32 Gbytes, the alternate capacity jumper changes the total available
LBA sectors to 32 Gbytes to solve issues with some BIOS during power on. The ATA Set Features subcommand
“F1H Report Full Capacity Available” causes Identify Data words 60 and 61 to report the full capacity.
See Section 4.1.3 on page 30 for more details on the Set Features command.
drive info
this link will take you to the drive info if you need a pic just click on manual
and yes you can just use copy and paste or cut and paste or add a short cut to your right click send to menu

Edited by peterm, 10 July 2005 - 01:51 AM.