Clicking noise from hard drive?

Freebyman

I assume since my hard drive is making skipping and clicking noises every so often that it is on its last legs?

Thankfully I have 2 backup drives a 160gb 7200rpm and 500gb 5400rpm (which is only a year old). My question is how do I go about cloning my dieing drive so its merely a question of switching over drives to boot first?

Any advice would be helpful?

SteveJH200

I have used this tool to clone before -works well. Depends on how much you've got on the faulty drive - you could create a partition on one of your other drives and clone to that. You can also use a caddy and clone to another disc too.

http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Todo-Backup-Free/3000-2242_4-10964460.html

banger9365

thats never a good sign ,time for a back up and new hdd ,but it might last for years yet ,better safe than sorry

fwor

Clonezilla will do it, provided the dying drive is no bigger than whichever of the backup drives you want to clone onto - it clones the MBR as well, so you can immediately boot from the backup.

If the dying drive is bigger than 500GB it should still be possible with extra work, provided of course it doesn't have more than 500GB of data on it.

Linbox

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx or Hirens HBCD

Im_just_careful

If you want to move your operating system to a new drive I would look at Seagate DiscWizard.

I generally buy Seagate Drives and DiskWizard made putting a new drive in a laptop very easy.

I put the new drive in a USB caddy ran Seagate DiskWizard and then physically installed the new drive.

A very good experience. Only the new drive needs to be Seagate.

http://www.seagate.com and search for DiskWizard

esuhl

Im_just_careful wrote: »

If you want to move your operating system to a new drive I would look at Seagate DiscWizard.

It looks like that's a re-branded version of Acronis TrueImage, which gets good reviews (but normally costs £39.95!).

robmar0se

Freebyman wrote: »

I assume since my hard drive is making skipping and clicking noises every so often that it is on its last legs?

Thankfully I have 2 backup drives a 160gb 7200rpm and 500gb 5400rpm (which is only a year old). My question is how do I go about cloning my dieing drive so its merely a question of switching over drives to boot first?

Any advice would be helpful?

As said, clicking drive is one indication that it may be on its last legs. First backup yr data, secondly run checkdisk c:/r and check the bad sectors report at the end; thirdly make sure you have 15% unused space (required for windows).

If the checkdisk report shows bad sectors then replace. If clean and you continue to use it, adjust yr system so that you personal folders (inc email) are stored on another drive, and continue to use but make sure you have the necessary backups/original Cds etc. (NB some clone systems will fail when they hit a bad sector)

Your call

amonaghan

Many new drives will come with a disk clone software, usually downloaded form the manufacturers web site.

Maxtor / Seagate do, I think Western Digital also do.

Alternatively look for xxclone or clonezilla

If there is any question over the disk health, swap it out ASAP to minimise data loss.

Freebyman

Thanks to all of your suggestions, it turns out that I had slightly knocked my sata lead when I installed a new CD/DVD drive the other day. Just clicked back in properly and no more clicking :embarasse