Solved

Sublime_2

I think my hard drive is on its way out. Its making a funny clicking/spinning? noise, and I've had trouble booting my pc up this past week.

I have an external 1tb seagate drive connected via USB, which I have just cloned my entire C disk too. Was using just for backup before, but believe this is now best in case of hard drive failure. This external drive used to be drive F, but is not now showing in my computer. Could this be to do with the fact that I've cloned my entire pc to it with all partitions? My boot order is currently C drive, then disk. If I was to make a bootable CD in case of hard drive failure would it pick up my cloned system on my external drive, or would it get stuck looking on my C drive.

Sorry if it sounds a bit stupid, but I've not had this problem before, and daren't even turn my pc off. The hard drive is still making that clicking/spinning noise. Commonsense tells me that a bootable disk should work, but want some advice please.

I will eventually replace my internal hard drive, have done so before on an old PC when running out of space, but need to have emergency measures in place just in case.

m5rcc

Possibly - boot up the defective PC and then attach the Seagate afterwards. Is the drive recognised now?

GeoffX

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/352816/seagate-hard-disks-suffer-from-click-of-death

m5rcc

Im under the impression that the PC hard drive is going out not the Seagate?

Sublime: can you clarify?

debitcardmayhem

Because you have cloned the disk, Windows cannot have 2 system disks, so the copy is hidden. If you go to My Computer right click on manage , then storage, disk management you will see that your cloned disk will be there . What dis you use to clone the disk by the way, can your PC boot from the USB drive? you could test out your clone by selecting the USB to boot (assuming the cloner has put on a boootstrap loader on the mbr, you could press F8 if ti starts and then just see if you get the menu up. If so then you can then use that copy to reclone it back to a new disk.

GeoffX

On the basis of the internal drive clicking and the external being a Seagate 1TB, I wouldn't trust either of them.

Sublime_2

Its definitely my internal hard drive. The seagate is fine. I've had problems getting my computer to boot, and sometimes this big orange light comes on (instead of blue) on the power switch like its working overtime, and it starts spinning really fast, and fails to boot. I have to leave it for a while, and keep trying to get it to boot up to even the BIOS. The noise is also coming from inside, and is continuous while my pc is on. The seagate is silent, and has always worked perfectly.No probs with click of death.

I'm wondering whether I should restart my computer (praying all the time) and setting the boot order to my seagate in the BIOS just in case, as I've nearly run out of space anyway on my 500GB drive (only 29GB free).

Sublime_2

Just created a Recovery Media CD using Paragon Drive Backup. Will test now.

closed

did you clone or image it? The latter would be better in case of failure, unless you are planning to take the usb hard disk out of it's case.

If you have a known suspect drive, you may want to make an additional copy of really important data to dvd.

Sublime_2

I did have images on my external drive, but decided to clone my entire hard disk complete with all partitions to it instead, so they would have been wiped. I did copy a good disk image to C first though.

Sublime_2

Strange. Left my heatiing on, and although it didn't boot the first time, it did the 3rd, instead of the 20th as has been happenning lately.

So wondering if the room temperature may have been the problem.