Emergency help needed ASAP
 

ok, so a little while ago, I clicked on My Computer and heard the dreaded "clickety click click" that is the precursor of a hard drive beginning its death throes. I've heard the sound before and I know it cant be good. So, I need to backup the HD before it dies completely. Thats the bad news.

The good news is that I run dual hard drives in my machine. The smaller (an 8gb Western Digital) houses my OS and installed programs, plus some odds and ends, while the larger (a 15gb Maxtor) holds most of my assorted data and movies/porn/etc. I feel relatively certain that the WD/OS drive is the one about to go, since a) it is older, and b) it gets the most use (as it holds the OS).

As I type this, I am in the process of clearing off the Maxtor drive so that it will have enough space to hold everything on the OS drive. (damn am I glad I got a cd burner recently). The next step is to backup/copy everything on the dying drive to the other drive so that I can use it until I get a replacement, without having to go through the bother of a fresh install of Winblows.


so, my question is this: what is the best way to go about copying/backup the OS drive. I want to be able to just pull it out and (after adjusting jumper and bios settings) have the remaining drive be bootable.

is it possible to do this just by drag and drop? or do I need to use a specific program? I have a proggie called DiskCopy (I think thats what its called) that is supposed to be handy for just such a situation, but have never used it like that before, only used it for copying floppies.

advice?

specs

dual hard drive setup
amd athlon 750 mghz cpu
224mb ram
running win98se

Norton ghost is great, burn the drive you want then slap it on a new drive. Great product.

drive image works pretty well. it can handle ntfs and ext2.

<i>is it possible to do this just by drag and drop? </i>

No.

You cannot drag and drop an operating system.

It is fortunate that you are able to back up all your data before the drive takes the giga_dump.

An OS looks at everything, understands where in the world it is, what machine it is on.

You cannot drag and drop Waldo into Fellatioland, when he originated in Cunnilingovokia.

Continue your backup, buy a drive, install that OS you paid for.

Unplug both drives. Buy a 40 GB Western Digital for 80 bucks. Reinstall OS and apps. Copy over data. Use old drives as bookends.

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#dlgtools

Buy another WD and you can use this FREE tool, it will do everything painlessly for you.

Poof,

When you buy a new hard drive. Don't go fucking nuts and get a 200 GB. I have a very strong suspicion that your BIOS will not support a large HDD. By large I mean anything about 120 GB. But by all means buy a new HDD as soon as you possibly can, then use the dataguard tool to copy over everything.

Windows wont recognize over 137 Gb anyways.

Yeah, that's what I was kinda getting at. Thanks.

"Windows wont recognize over 137 Gb anyways."

damn, you mean the 147.4386 gb drive I just bought online for $495 isnt going to work? well shit on a shingle Batman.


seriously though, I have come up with what I think is a good plan of action. since my current installation of winblows is getting a bit dodgy these days, I have decided to do a fresh install of win98 on the good drive and switch it over to being the master/boot drive. then I can, at my leisure, transfer over (or reinstall, depending) all the progs that are currently on the dying drive. once all that is complete, I'll replace it with a new drive (probably gonna go with a 40 or 60 gb, depending on price).

thanks for all the suggestions.

i would recomend getting another hard drive thats not western digital, ive had 3 WD HD's die on me within a year and i will not buy another one again!

im gonna get another Maxtor.

maxtors always die on me :(... actually... if you get xcopy32 and run it from dos, that is, if you don't have norton ghost etc or other disc image copying programs, you can use xcopy32 and it'll copy everything, it's sorta like a big ass swap. I used it when my drive went Pfffbbbllltt and i was able to totally swap everything including settnigs and such. The key to using xcopy32 is to use the right tags to modify the command line. Oh well, look into norton ghost if it's still working, you could just as easily burn a disc image since your burner works