hard drive dying need help on partitions and backing up.

[rouse42]

hi,
rebooted pc last night and it said Hard disk failure was going to happen soon and to back up all my data.

im off to buy a 320gb western digital right now.

later today i need to reinstall every thing.
what is the best way to do it.

i have 2 drives right now.
C: 120gb and H: 120gb
C has 8 partions on it. H: has no partitions
i was thinking of taking H: out and pluggin the new drive in there.
problem is how do i go about getting windows reinstalled correctly

was thinking that i would make my partitions on the new drive and then
somehow try to reinstall windows fresh. but how do i save all my current preferences. from my current install.

or would it be eaiser to somehow clone the original drive and then just swap them out. and then resize partitions.
whats the best way to go about this. thanks



is there a way to set up all my partitions and then only copy C: partition over to the new drive and then swap drives? so i boot off of the new one and then copy the rest of the old stuff over.

 

[Codesmith]

I would use True Image 9 to backup the OS partition and then restore it to the new drive. I would then use it to copy the remaining partitions. You can re-size them in the process.

You could simply copy all the partitions, but its nice to have a backup image of your OS handy.

Warning if you give the new drive a drive letter before you move your OS to it, that assignment will be stored in Windows registry and will persist even after you move the OS. Changing the drive letter of the OS partition breaks XP.

If you still have the original C: drive connected it will appear to work until you remove C:

If you make this mistake you will have run some boot utility to edit the registry to remove the incorrect drive letter. - Neither simple nor fun.

--

BTW I would only recommend 2 partitions on your system disc and one partition on all remaining discs.

I wrote a very long post explaining why this is a good idea, but feel free to partition you drives however you want.