Windows vista complete backup

Hi Flynn, & Welcome to Tom's Hardware!

I'm impressed you are checking your HDD and it's health periodically.

Sounds like you don't have a method at present (backup plan) to protect your data. That's important to have, like Acronis True Image, should you delete or the Drive Gods decide to delete your hard earned data.

If your new HDD will arrive shortly, you could just "Clone" the old drive to the new drive, and swap its place. Back in business. Can be done with both connected on a different computer with Ghost or EaseUS Partition Master, or could be done with a "Clone" applet on a DVD without booting up to the System HDD, such as the Acronis Restore disk, or Parted Magic. Seagate has a cloning applet to clone from an old HDD to a new Seagate HDD to, download also which is free.

You could Image your System HDD to a separate BackUp HDD, then restore it over to your new HDD, but that takes an Imaging Applet and a separate HDD. You can't Image your data to a BackUp HDD, then restore it to the same disk.

Lastly, you could backUp your data, My Documents, Favorites, Videos, Photos, to a separate HDD, then Clean install your OS to the new drive, then reinstall your Application programs, and finally copy back to the new drive your saved documents.

Might consider Seagates' Disk Wizard to just Clone your old drive, and be done (except of course to set up a BackUp Plan for data insurance!)

I've only got one system, will only have 2 hard drives, 1 8 gig usb thumb drive, and a 64 gigabyte itouch

thats all ive got to work with at the moment


am i not able to simple put the 2nd HD in the system, and put the backup on that hard drive, and then using windows restore on the windows disc, make that 2nd hd the OS drive

Are you trying to perform a "one-for-one" clone?

If so, you can use Acronis or Paragon or some of the recommended free apps out there to perform such duty.

Easiest thing to do would be to get the new HDD, connect it to existing system, run the cloning tools, perform a complete clone from source to destination, shutdown, remove the old HDD, install the new HDD and you should be good to go.

...or am I missing what you are trying to accomplish?

Hi Flynn,

Either way you have to open your computer to swap out the older HDD for the new cloned one.
Just for cloning, everything considered, the Seagate cloning tool may be the best.

Or if you are uncomfortable getting into your computer, one of the local computer shops for ~$25 can clone your OS to the new HDD and replace it in your case. Nothing wrong with that.

Flynn,
I have Vista Ultimate and use the complete back feature once a month. I actually use a USB HD enclosure for the back up. From what i understand it creates a back up file of the entire drive. It is not a clone image really. If failure happens. You would get a new HD drive or raid array , reinstall Vista then you could restore everything from the back up file.

I think you have it on what im trying to do, ive got the old 1 TB hard drive, and ive got the replacement 1 TB hard drive, in that sense, i am trying to make the new hard drive carry the old drives legacy without any other factors because I have no other factors, and ive got 800 gigs used up, albeit trying to clean some of it out to make it more possible


you're saying by using one of those 2 programs, I can essentially have the old drive plugged in, and the new drive also installed, and one of the 2 programs will completely clone my old hard drive into my new drive and its that simple? Will I not require some sort of disc related means to activating the clone/copy so that i can continue on with my life?

edit: From what im seeing, I've got a major problem, I cannot use an uploaded backup service, I've got a bandwith cap, and I dont want or need to run my families service bill upto a few thousand dollars +

Yes, you want to clone the old hard drive to the new one. Plug in the new one in so the software can see both of them. Sometimes new hard drives will come with a copy of ghost or something similar. Was there any software with your replacement drive?

Yes, seagates disc utility



edit: it seems that i dont think a clone will work, ive got some bad sectors or sectors that fail the direct r/w op 0x590001, which im assuming is automatic data loss, am i able to OS the new drive, and just make the old drive the slave, and pull everything from there onto the new drive?

If your drive has some bad sectors i suggest buying - http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

It's expensive, but depending on how desperate you are at recovering your data on that hard drive SpinRite is one option. Unless someone has another option (and sending to a data recovery is just too expensive, SpinRite is a cheaper solution). But for now i wouldn't use that hard drive as you may corrupt the drive further by using it.

Installing an OS on the spare drive then trying to pull the data off the bad drive but it depends on whether it will work (backup didn't work correctly).

Hi again,

If there are bad sectors on your old HDD, run the command line utility Chkdsk /f /r. It will scan the whole drive using those switches and mark bad sectors as bad, and move any questionable data to a good sector.

then use the Seagate clone utility on the CD. Connect the new HDD by a SATA connector, or USB attachement.
Since you can't be using the system HDD (windows can't be running), use the CD which uses either a DOS or Linux OS temporarily, and clones your old HDD to the new HDD. When done, you have the exact copy of your old drive on the new one.

Then just take out the old one, and replace it with the new one and boot up.

It's not necessary but you could then run Chkdsk /b, which clears all the marked bad sectors, and lets chkdsk remark any bad ones on the new drive.

An important step is to go through your old HDD before cloning it, and delete old stuff you don't need, duplicates, etc. If there is old data you need to save but probably never use, just move those to a separate folder, then burn them to a DVD for storage.