Dead HDD

[FidelDeVinci]

Recently my computer has been having difficuly booting (an error message saying "no bootable device found" comes up and i have no choice but to reset the system and wait for an hour or so and it starts up just fine)

The only thing that was different was that my hard drive was making a creaking sound. Its familiar to me because I grew up around very old computers but this was new for my PC. I looked this up and found out that it is actually a warning that my HDD was failing so I went out and purchased another one (WD Caviar Black 1Tb, exact same as my old one)

When I got home I decided to try to switch the old HDD connection from the 3Gb/s slot to the 6 Gb/s slot before I opened the new one. Since then I hear the creaking but the computer works fine.

My question(s) are:
should I still switch out the hard drive? Or do i not need to?
If so would cloning the hard drive work/what software should I use?

 

[tomatthe]

I would test the drive using WD tools, but make sure you back anything up prior to testing the drive. Sometimes testing drives is enough to push them over the edge, and they completely die.

WD also has drive cloning software for their hard drives which is listed at the link below along with their drive testing software.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?wdc_lang=en&fid=wdsfDesktop_Black

 

[vodomore]

I suggest save your data ASAP, then you can play with your old HDD whenever you want.

As capacity increasing, now days HDDs are not reliable as the old good times.

 

[FidelDeVinci]

First off, thank you very much for you're replies. They did help.

I did use the WD testing tool, but everything came up fine, although it still makes the noise.

I just ordered a 512 GB SSD and returned my new 1TB HDD because I trust SSD's a bit more. Im just going to redownload and transfer everything, hopefully for the last time!

Thanks again guys!

 

[FidelDeVinci]

Best answer selected by FidelDeVinci.