My boot drive C: is making tons of noise, and is ready to go. How can I move everything, including Win XP SP2, to a new drive and then make it the new boot drive?
I don't want to move into Vista yet.
I have EMC retrospect software. Will that work?
I have an available second drive bay available.
Any hardware/software suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.
2007-06-06 06:01:11 · 5 answers · asked by Chuck 1 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
First make sure that it's the HD that's making the noise and not those fans that's installed in your powersupply and CPU.
The HD is inside a vacuum (literally), and i think you cant hear it, unless its thrashing (temporarily using HD as RAM). If it's thrashing, then it's not HD problem, it's your RAM requiring an upgrade.
2007-06-06 06:44:29 · answer #1 · answered by Martial H 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Norton Ghost is ok, but unless it's changed recently, then you just can't copy the image to a new disk. The image has to be "installed."
You create a new image, and then you "install" it onto the new drive using Ghost again.
If you choose to go with Maxtor drives, their free MaxBlast software has the option of taking the old drive and making an image of the old drive and putting it on the new drive.
Hard drives are only used as RAM if you're using the old RAMDISK.SYS operation to use it as RAM. Windows does use a swap file on the harddrive as a temporary storage location. Typical it is only 1500mb or so, but can be increased to a maximum of 4096mb. The swap file size is increased up to the max of 4096 when Windows needs to store more temp data. This does slow down Windows some. You can change this by setting the minimum and maximum size to 4096. This eliminates Windows adding space to the swap file before it writes to it.
You should never hear RAM. It has no physical moving parts.
You never said what kind of noise.
Harddrives can make noise, not typically, but they can. Seagate drives use to be notorious for this. The inside of a harddrive is not a vaccum. It is made to be dust free. But each harddrive does have a small vent hole. There is an air-gap between the platter and the read/write head. Extremely small, but the arm rides on a cushion of air as the platters rotate.
Easiest check for what's making noise is if you have any case cooling fans, shutdown the computer, unplug the 3-wire connector for each fan from the motherboard, etc., and restart you PC. Check the noise level. Shut down, reconnect the fans, and restart. Some fans aren't as easy to check, namely video card fans. Usually I gently press on the center of the fan until it stops. If it was making the noise it goes away if not it's not the fan.
For that matter you can even check if it is the harddrive. If you don't have a bootable floppy, make one, or if you have a bootable CD (like the Windows install) from any install program. Shut down, unplug the power to your harddrive and restart. If the noise goes away, it's your harddrive, if not then it's somethine else. The bootable floppy or CD allows the computer to bootup without a harddrive and you can do some other troublesearching. If you booted from a Windows install CD just exit the install screen.
2007-06-06 06:20:33 · answer #2 · answered by GeorgeC 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
First thing is buy a new drive, no matter what you are going to do, you are going to need a new hard drive. Now you have a couple of options. If you still have the disks for most of your software, motherboard drivers, etc.. I recommend backing up any data that you want to save to a CD-R or jump Drive, then I would just load a fresh copy of windows on to my new hard drive. If this is not an option then you need to Ghost your drive to your new hard drive. This will do a direct copy of your old hard drive to the new along with all of your settings, some think this is easier (witch it is) but I always like a new undisturbed fast version of windows. It seems that the software you mentioned will do the backup ghosting duties but I am not familiar with its use. Good luck
2007-06-06 06:22:22 · answer #3 · answered by Daniel L 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
you NEVER want to move into vista that would be you're worst night mare....
get your self a new hard drive. first.
then copy all the files you need to save onto cd's windows will need to be reinstalled because the MBS (Master Boot Sectore) will not have the details on the new drive,,
2007-06-06 06:27:17 · answer #4 · answered by Carling 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Use Norton Ghost to image the failing drive and copy the image to a new drive.
2007-06-06 06:05:02 · answer #5 · answered by Del Piero 10 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋