My hard drive is failing. Buying a new one. Can I transfer my windows over and if so how?

[daniel202]

A Little Backstory-
My laptop had a 500gb seagate hdd in it, but my pc dramatically slowed and anything to do with loading from the hard drive was EXCESSIVELY slow. It was/is to the point where Windows 10 wont boot properly and gets stuck on a partially loaded desktop screen after 20 minutes of starting up. (It probably would have loaded properly if it had a few hours :lol I immediately knew this was an issue with my hard drive. I swapped in a temporary 300gb hard drive and "salvaged" my pc's drivers onto a usb using Samsung Recovery Solution. I am getting a new hard drive in a few days.

The Bigger Issues-
I have checked a couple threads on things similar to this, but have seen no possible way I can solve this without having 2 drives in at once besides making a drive image*****. (I only have one accessible SATA port on my motherboard. D:
I don't have any more... well rather ANY money to spend on software or additional hardware. (Being that I am a scrubby 15 year old who has no job! )

*****I'd rather not attempt this, because the drive may fail.

Question(s)-
Is it possible for me to recover the os from my crappy drive by booting from a usb and putting the os on another usb?

Is there anyway I can salvage my Windows 7 product key from it so I can do a clean install onto my new drive and then upgrade to Windows 10 again?

Better yet, I have access to a 1tb external drive that can easily take the capacity of what was left on my failing hard drive. Should I make an attempt to make an image of it and possibly put that into my new drive?
-How would I do so?
-If I were to make an image of the bad drive onto the external drive, would it overwrite pre-existing data on that external drive?

P.S. The "bad" drive still functions for now so most of these seem like viable options for me. (Besides an image transfer***** (The quicker the method the better.))

I really appreciate any feedback in advance.

Thanks,
Daniel

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, Daniel!

If the HDD is failing, I'd definitely not advise you to make an image of it, it's possible that some data is already corrupted on it, so it's better to perform a clean install on your newly acquired HDD.
I have some good news regarding the OS as well! As long as you use the same computer (more specifically the same motherboard), you won't need to buy a new genuine OS version. The operating system communicates with the motherboard in the computer, so you shouldn't face any issues using the same Windows Product Key with the same Windows version.
I'd just advise you backup all important data from your failing drive onto the external. (excluding the OS and software apps) Afterwards, perform a clean install of Windows 7 and refer to the MS knowledge base for more guidelines.

Let me know if you have more questions! Best of luck!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[DannyLM]

Hey Daniel,

In a situation like this, the more you keep using the failing drive, the higher the chance that it will completely die.
You will definitely need to get the new HDD in there.

What you can do in terms of data depends (as always...) on money.

For $15-20, you can get a USB-HDD adapter, or a USB HDD enclosure.
This will allow you to connect the old drive via USB, and copy files from it to the newly installed Windows.

There are tools out there that can copy everything including programs etc. (such as Zinstall's Rescue Kit), but they are expensive, so I think the adapter is the best cost-performance option here.

If that is not an option as well, you can do the image. Unfortunately, on a failing drive, this may instead kill it completely, so that is the last resort in my book.