Hard Drive Failure

My hard drive started making a ton of clicking noises last week. Needless to say, it was dying. I had to take actions really quickly to prevent losing everything on my drive. Although I back up my vital files regularly to external drives, I did not want to waste my time having to re-install all the software on my computer on a new drive and redo all the settings. After talking to my co-workers and friends, I learned that I can copy everything from the dying drive to a new one without having to do everything from scratch. In other words, it will seem as if nothing had ever happened. Some of the options included using Partition Magic, Norton Ghost, and included software from hard drive manufacturers. I decided to try the free software from hard drive manufacturers first instead of paying extra for software.

I bought a new Western Digital SATA hard drive right away. I was lucky that it was on sale. I got a new 320 GB 7200 RPM SATA drive for $100. The hardware installation was quick and easy. I had the new drive up and running, partitioned to mimic my old drive under an hour. I installed the software from Western Digital and transferred my data using "Drive to Drive". This step took a really long time. I could only copy a partition at a time. At one point I had to re-start copying one of the partitions because the old drive started clicking and froze. No, it was not happy, and I was not happy. Long story short, it took me about 7 - 8 hours to transfer everything over. Afterwards, I disconnected my dying drive and booted up the computer using the new Western Digital. It was pretty amazing to see everything from desktop wall paper, short cuts, applications, files, to settings on the new drive as if nothing had ever happened. The only difference is that the new drive, being new and unfragmented, performs much faster in booting and lauching applications.

I am considering getting a copy of Norton Ghost or something similar in case something like this happens again. Maybe I should set up RAID for my desktop to prevent any disruptions in the future. This time I was lucky that my data on the old drive was not damaged. I was able to copy everything over directly from the old drive without any problems. Having full image back ups or a mirrored hard drive will prevent any data loss due to hardware failure.