This is not a how-to. No pictures. This is rather the tale of a fairly proficient user who isn’t afraid to beat her way through computer problems. The key to success is that most people have more than one computer in the home these days, so if you get stuck you just use the other computer to research until you find the answer. FYI – the computer is a Windows 7 desktop.
I’ve known for a while my hard drive was failing. I started getting the dreaded BSOD (blue screen of death) and the system would shut down and restart. I researched the information I got from WhoCrashed (Microsoft’s crash info is useless) and was not able to fix it no matter what I tried.
It was suggested on some forum’s discussing my particular error to do some tests. I did a checkdisk that took two days for my 640 GB drive and found bad sectors. I used memtest to check the memory and it was fine. I downloaded the diagnostics from Western Digital and it told me there was enough damage to the drive that it should be replaced.
So now I had confirmed what I already knew.
I’d been putting this off because I was sure it involved installing Windows on a new formatted drive and then each and every one of my many, many programs. It would take me days. I’m sort of a power user.
Putting off addressing a failing hard drive is fairly suicidal if all your data resides on the drive without backup. If that is your situation, get a new hard drive as soon as you suspect the problem. Or play Russian roulette with all your data. Your choice.
Since the operating system drive is the most heavily used drive and most likely to fail I had gone to a multi-disk system several years ago. All my data resides on other hard drives and is duplicated on even other drives so if one craters on me I have another place to go for the files.
I love cloud storage, but I have gone completely digital. All my music, all my movies, all my photos( I even scanned every single paper photo I had), much less all my documents and worksheets add up to a ton of data so I have several hard drives to hold the originals and backups. Really important things are on three different drives. The one exception is my movies – I recently had the drive that held my movie files fail and was able to get it to last long enough to copy it all to a new drive. See my post Hard Disk Drive Failure – what to do.
A great alternative
Then I stumbled across imaging or cloning the drive. Wow – what a concept. Copy the drive to a new drive and have it functional with the operating system, all existing programs, even all the data on the drive. Cool! I was in.
After more research I decided to go with a free program called Clonezilla. My computer has a raid system with hot-swappable drives. For the uninitiated, that means I can pull out and replace drives without shutting down the computer (all except the operating drive). It’s wonderful. What it also means is it would be easy for me to put the new drive in one of the hot-swappable spots and copy from the operating system drive.
I need to warn you this process isn’t for the faint of heart. Unless you’re very knowledgeable or of the mindset that you will beat something into submission if that’s what it takes, you might not want to try this. I fall into the latter group.
The method
Or lack thereof. I really stumbled my way through this.
I put in the new drive and went to disk management under administrative tools. It had the new drive and I box popped up asking if I wanted to add a boot sector, so I let that process. I had read “Disk cloning software may not be aware of the hidden partition and as a result only clone the Windows 7 partition, leaving you with an unbootable hard drive” so I wanted to make sure that boot sector was there.
I removed all the other hard drives so I was down to the two I needed.
I had already downloaded and created a bootable USB drive containing Clonezilla while I was waiting for the hard drive to arrive from Amazon. By the way — I got a 1 TB Seagate drive for $59.99.
There are numerous blogs and youtube videos on how to use Clonezilla. These are some I looked at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzxL95GmmYk
They directed me how to get Clonezilla going. I started cloning the image to the new drive. It didn’t get very far until it bailed out telling me there were bad sectors on the drive and couldn’t go any further and mentioned I could use “rescue”. Didn’t tell me how to do that, but mentioned that I could. The adventure begins.
Expert mode in Clonezilla
It was easy to get into the expert mode. It was not easy to figure out how to use it. I tried repeatedly to select “rescue” but there were no directions on the screen and if I hit enter it went on to the next screen with no “back” option so I would have to reboot and try again. And again. Argggg.
I finally found this PDF on using expert mode ftp://ftp.itb.ac.id/pub/Clonezilla/clonezilla_live_doc/QuickReference_Card_0.9.5/ClonezillaLiveRefCard_EN_folding_0.9.5.pdf and it mentioned you use the damn space bar to select options. How the hell would I have ever known that? I was getting a little testy at that point.
I also selected “Check and repair source filesystem before cloning” but I need to make it clear — I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. It just sounded like a good idea.
Rescue mode
The rescue found many bad sectors that it couldn’t copy. So many in fact, I was beginning to wonder if I would have trash on the new drive. Then I looked up that a sector is 512 bytes. I did the math and found out that 640 GB drive had roughly 1.23 billion sectors. I was less worried.
The copy took a surprisingly short amount of time. Definitely less than an hour. The new drive contained the exact same stuff as the old drive.
It wasn’t over yet
I pulled the old operating system drive and installed the new one like I had it all figured out. Wrong. No matter what I did I couldn’t get the computer to book. I put the old operating system drive back in. I got into windows and went into disk management and it told me there was a conflict so the new drive was inactive. More research with no good answer so I made it active. What the heck.
I pulled the old operating system drive again and tried booting from the new drive. I may have booted that poor computer 20-30 times today.
I was asked for the Windows repair disk since it couldn’t boot. It tried to do a repair and failed. I tried booting again several times. Finally it asked for the original Windows disk. I put that in, it ran for a while and the computer booted from the new drive. Go figure.
Final detail
After I properly installed the new hard drive and reassembled the computer I booted it up and found one more issue. When looking at it in disk management there was about 350 GB of unallocated space. How they heck do you fix that.
More research and forums suggested easeus partition manager to fix partition issues. That piece of crap installed a bunch of malware. Goody — more computer issues to resolve.
I got back into disk management, right clicked on the allocated part of the drive and merge was one of the options. I clicked it and the unallocated part was brought into the allocated part. Woohoo. That was easy. Well, except for the easus mess I had to clean up.
How long?
Believe it or not I started at 10:00 AM and was up and running at 1:30 PM. Three and a half hours. I doubt I would have had Windows 7 installed in that amount on time, much less the task of re-installing all my programs.
Malware cleanup
The 3.5 hours doesn’t include cleaning up the malware though. Later I used ADW Cleaner, Junk Removal Tool, and Rkill that I got from Bleeping Computer. Great cleaner programs. It didn’t take long to get rid of it.
I swear if I get the stupid conduit search protect crap installed one more time I’m going to go after someone with a bazooka. I couldn’t believe even a download from CNET included that, so I won’t use them anymore. Here’s a wiki on what to do if you have it http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-Conduit-Search-Protect.
What do I think of cloning?
One of the first posts I read said that cloning wouldn’t create a boot sector. Maybe some cloning programs don’t, but Clonezilla does. The whole process was really incredibly easy. There are always extraneous issues to deal with when you do this sort of thing, so I don’t feel what I had to figure out was that bad. Not compared to re-installing lots and lots of programs.
I’ve tried quite a few programs and so far all are running really well. If I encounter problems down the line I will post an update.
The nice thing – I shouldn’t have to worry about this for a long time.
