Hardware & Technical New Hard drive time.

[Zak Gordon]

I should know the answer to this, but it has been a while since i've had to deal with the issue so i'm a little hazy on the topic, and my internet searches have not been too helpful (which is weird in itself).

What do i need to do to copy my data over to the new drive?

Anyway my main gaming system has an SSD boot drive, and two HDD storage drives. Most of my games on the E:/ drive, with D:/ being the CD-ROM and F:/ as the pure storage device.

The E:/ drive has started to report some errors recently so i went out and bought a 2TB WD Black to replace it (it was a 1TB enterprise HGST that was about 6 years old).

If i was replacing the boot drive i would want to clone the data on it and install that on the new drive, but as this is not the boot drive i think i need a different approach?

Do i simply copy/paste the contents of the failing E:/ drive over to the new one? So i would need to install this new one into the PC first as a new drive (i will pop out the F:/ drive and put it in that slot).

Once the data is moved over i will remove the failing E: drive, move the new drive to it's slot, reboot and rename the new drive to E:/, then add back the original F:/ drive.

I want to ensure all the games and installed stuff on this E:/ drive will work as before.

Is it as simple as that? I'm probably having a brain freeze over this

 

[Robert Maynard]

It should be as simple as a copy / paste - and doing so permits testing after the old drive has been removed (as opposed to using cut / paste).

 

[Shadowdancer]

I've successfully used Partition Wizard (https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html) several times to clone, move, resize even system disks. Set up GPT on the new disk, clone old partitions to new disk, resize partition and file system, reassign drive letters, click "apply" and go fro a walk. Just make sure you don't have anything use either of the disks while the operation is running.

At this time I'd just have paid for a name brand SSD though

 

[TorTorden_VR]

I would also just do a straight copy. Doesn't really need any more voodoo than that.
And once the copy is complete, move the drive letter from the old over to the new and the libraries should just start working again, barring they don't do some weird hardware security checks and encryptions etc.

One way to chajole the drive from not being used could be to change the drive letter from e: to z: before copying over the old files, then changing the new to E:

 

[Zak Gordon]

Well i more or less followed the procedure i outlined in the first post. The main difference was the faulty HDD was a split partition drive, so it had the E:/ and F;/ partitions on it. G:/ was the other HDD.

So the first process was to remove the G:/ drive (so i had space to mount the new HDD), then use the Windows 7 inbuilt Disk Management tools to format and create two 1TB (well you get less space than that) partitions on the new drive.

I gave them labels of H: and I:

Then when they were ready i started the copy/paste process by 'selecting all' in the original E:/ drive and copy/pasting that into the H:/ partition. I then did the same from the original F:/partition to go into the new I:/ partition on the new drive.

Once that was all done i shut down, removed the new drive, removed the old failing one, put the new one where the old failing one was, and put the original G:/ back in, then restarted.

There was an issue here however. After a reboot i could not access the Computer Management tool (it gave a pathing 'could not find x on path y' type error), so i knew something was up. I could not either open the new H:/ and I:/ partitioned drive to change their names directly (like right click 'rename' etc.

So as ALL my windows stuff is installed only on the C:/ drive (SSD) i was a bit confused as it looked like the process i used had changed access to stuff on the C:/ drive. Which seemed weird to me. The System would boot fine, as normal but access to system tools and other stuff on that C:/ drive was a bit messed up.

Anyway after a tea break i booted up into safe mode, and from that was able to access the Computer Manager and Disk Management tool to change the new drive to be named exactly as the old one had been ('Local Disk' and with the E:/ and F:/ partitions).

Once rebooted and everything worked fine and all my game and program links (and the system files on C:/ like Computer Management etc) were intact and everything works again, is named as it should be etc.

So there was a little mistake in the process it seems, although i still do not know why my C:/ drive access was messed up with what i did (changing out a completely different drive).

So i thought i'd share the story for others that might need to know what to look for. It might have been better to use a clone type tool perhaps, but the process did end up giving me the result i was after.

 

[Zak Gordon]

2nd Hard disk error! Must be the season?!

So my missus PC started to play up a few days back (took ages to open firefox and/or other programs, intermittent kind of problem) and after some malware checking i noticed Crystal Disk Info give a yellow 'caution' warning and some 'current pending sector count' errors (3).

So i decided (probably wrongly) to run ChkDsk (with error fixing for bad sectors) and it duly fixed 3, and the PC worked fine (no issue opening programs etc). So i left it for a day (that is was being used, all 'fine' but in hindsight not a good idea) while i sourced a replacement 1TB drive.

Then the next day it again was slow opening firefox and other things, so wrongly i ran ChkDsk again, and it reported about 8 bad sector clusters fixed.

Then it was a case of doing an image asap and getting the new HDD installed. I used these guides:

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/4241/how-to-create-a-system-image-in-windows-7/

https://www.howtogeek.com/239312/how-to-restore-system-image-backups-on-windows-7-8-and-10/

During the creation of the system image it failed right at the end, unable to finish the 'shadow copy'. luckily i had a system repair disk already made and was able to use that to start the process of getting the image cloned onto the new HDD, and it all worked despite that error at the end.

So i consider this a very close call. The only other system image for the PC was from a year ago, so i'm going to be doing those a little more frequently from now on, and if seeing any errors in future will just get the image saved and installed on a new HDD asap, rather than wait a day or two.

Oh the system is all running fine, so the windows tools worked ok.

 

[Morbad]

If you run into any pending sectors, best practice is to immediately back up the drive then zero write it. If it's not a physical error, filling the drive with 0s should fix the pending sectors. if it is a phyical issue, they will be marked as bad and permanently reallocated. Any reallocated sectors should be considered a sign of pending failure and the drive should be replaced.

Any drive can fail at any time with no warning and should be treated as such. Any data you consider important should be in at least three different places, at least one of which is geographically separated from the rest.