Calling AlienRik!

aliEnRIK

3 hours to format??
Id def say its time for a new hard drive. Ive formatted 500 Gig hard drives in less than half that time!

onejontwo

BTW. are all these hard drives pretty much the same apart from storage capacity as I thought that would be the case when I upgraded the memory a few years ago and I was faced with a huge selection of different types. I eventually went to crucial.com and was very pleased with the results.

aliEnRIK

Theres 2 types of IDE (though id say 1 type as the others virtually obsolete now) and SATA
So long as you buy 3.5" for DESKTOP and the correct connection (IDE or SATA) then your away

Makes id consider are ~
Seagate
Western Digital
Hitachi
Samsung

gaming_guy

onejontwo wrote: »

BTW. are all these hard drives pretty much the same apart from storage capacity as I thought that would be the case when I upgraded the memory a few years ago and I was faced with a huge selection of different types. I eventually went to crucial.com and was very pleased with the results.

there are 2 main types of HDD as aliEnRik pointed out in the last post (IDE, SATA).

for a desktop, it would usually have a 7200RPM 3.5inch drive and either a SATA or IDE connection depending on what the computers motherboard supports.

edit- (this is just a quick warning about some larger seagate drives) i would advise against buying Seagate 1TB drives as there were firmware issues with the drives which may have caused the drive to brick and data loss would occur.

onejontwo

So if I took the hard drive out, went to pc world or say maplins with the hard drive so they could match it, fitted it, is it then a matter of installing windows xp or would I have to format the drive or adjust any settings etc.

aliEnRIK

You would need to FULL format the drive (To be safe) and install XP as normal (then the drivers etc)

onejontwo

Is there any easy way of determining which hard drive is installed? Ie. right click on something?

gaming_guy

onejontwo wrote: »

Is there any easy way of determining which hard drive is installed? Ie. right click on something?

if you mean the connection type of the drive, just take the side panel of the case off and if you see some flat and wide grey cables (like this) then it has an IDE drive. if not, then it probably uses SATA.

when you do this, make sure the computer is turned off.

antispam246

onejontwo wrote: »

Ran a disc check and it found 2 bad clusters which it said it replaced, does this mean that the hard drive is repaired or does it mean it's on it's way out?
Now that you mention the hard drive, I've noticed it's getting slightly noisier than usual, is this a big job to replace if needed and how do you transfer all your data (or am I jumping the gun?)

I'd definately get it replaced asap. I think when it replaces the bad sectors, it uses a backup portion of the sector but there's a good chance more will come up. Can't recall if I mentioned it before but when you start seeing bad sectors you definately want to start thinking about backing up your data and replacing your hard disk.

Backing up your data you have various options, how hard it's going to be depends on your expertise and what hardware you have available. In summary

1) Buy new hard disk, install alongside the existing disk, then you can copy the data across, copy just the important data across (stuff you don't want to lose), or try cloning the original disk, there's tonnes of software out there that will do this. Acronis does a godo package for this.

2) Backup to an external drive, this would be a usb drive and be the simplest method if you have one or can even borrow one. You'd merely plug in your hard disk, most likely to a USB port and then transfer files across. It's the quicket method if you're worried.

3) Backup all important things to Cd/DVd if you have a cd/dvd writer, another very quick method to cover yourself should your hard disk fail sooner rather than later.

Personally, I'd start with immediately backing up anything very important, I'd back this up to DVD using a dvd/writer. It'd be the quickest and easiest method with the right tools. Then you can have some piece of mind that you won't simply lose your important data without notice.

Next i'd look to buying an internal hard disk as a replacement to my original, I'd install it inside the PC alongside the original and probably try to clone the hard disk first so I wouldn't have to reinstall a million programs. If that fails, create 2 or 3 partitions on the new hard disk. Backup all important data to one of these partitons and then reinstall windows and everything else on another partiton for a clean start.

If you do get a new hard disk, make sure you run all the previously mentioned checks above first to ensure there's no issues with your new disk.

Probably sounds some what complicated but merely googling any of the aforementioned will give you a wealth of information and guides on each subject.