HDD Problems

[kud125]

hey guys in need of a little bit of help so some advice would be greatly appreciated

heres the situation- i have an old packard bell pc, and because my genius parents decided to buy it from PC world, the windows xp OS is installed on the hard disk and not on a cd

well the HDD has just decided to break down, it goes to load and gets to the windows loading screen, the computer then restarts and tells me i need to backup and replace my hard disk

so we ordered a brand new hard disk drive, if i set the new drive to slave, is there a way to backup the entire contents of the original hard disk to the brand new one set to slave

thanks

 

[AgentSmith]

u sure thats a broken hdd im no expert but if your gettin to the loadin windows screen something has to be workin because atm im using a BROKEN hdd if its not workin i can hear it scratchin sometimes and nothing loads from boot. have you enabled S.M.A.R.T i think its called in the bios it tells you on boot if something is wrong with your hdd

 

[Neptune]

hey guys in need of a little bit of help so some advice would be greatly appreciated

heres the situation- i have an old packard bell pc, and because my genius parents decided to buy it from PC world, the windows xp OS is installed on the hard disk and not on a cd

well the HDD has just decided to break down, it goes to load and gets to the windows loading screen, the computer then restarts and tells me i need to backup and replace my hard disk

so we ordered a brand new hard disk drive, if i set the new drive to slave, is there a way to backup the entire contents of the original hard disk to the brand new one set to slave

thanks

i got this problem.

basicly wot i did was i just used my new HDD (well it wasnt new was a ****ty 14 gig 1 but it did the job) as the masster drive an reinstalled windows on it, now that iv got that done an that the computer was loading up an was letting me play on games use the net properly ect ect i then added the "broken" HDD as a slave drive. all worked fine.

but i had a problem wen i did this i was lucky. i had just got all the info off the HDD (the slave drive 1) an then i shut down my pc bc i had finished with it got wot i needed, then wen i reloaded windows up the HDD wudnt load and left me with a error. just wen u get it working like that add ur old HDD to the pc wen the new 1 works fine. an remeber to gain all the documents u need from the old 1 just incase this happens to u.

so the anser to ur question m8 is yes

 

[kud125]

have you enabled S.M.A.R.T i think its called in the bios it tells you on boot if something is wrong with your hdd

i said in my original post in the boot screen it tells me to backup and replace my HDD and gives me an error about what's wrong with it

just wen u get it working like that add ur old HDD to the pc wen the new 1 works fine. an remeber to gain all the documents u need from the old 1 just incase this happens to u.

big problem there, the original OS installed onto the broken HDD, is like an OEM copy of windows xp, i have no cd's or anything for it.

 

[Neptune]

its ok u wont need any windows for me. on my spare comp my HDD aint got windows on it or anythin an it will let me save files to it fine for me. is it windows xp u dont have for ur new HDD??

 

[AgentSmith]

try bootin it up without smart enabled thats what im doin and it seems to work altho one of my partitions is unsuaable maybe you might be able to get into windows without smart enabled and back up copu of the impportant parts of your main drive

 

[Stonehelm]

I had a simmilar problem, didnt get the error your talking about though. When i turned my computer on it would get to windows loading screen reboot and give me the safe mode etc option but it just rebooted on all of the options available.

Simple solution if you have another computer just stick your hard drive in it and it should run check/scan disk on it automatically and fix the problem.

Give it a try its a damn site better than loosing everything.

(oh and i believe that all PC world PC's come with a restore disk which has the specified OS on there)

 

[kud125]

(oh and i believe that all PC world PC's come with a restore disk which has the specified OS on there)

ye i did create a recovery cd a while ago, i think i could find it out

i just thought that the pc world restore disks only reloaded the windows setup off the hard disk, so if i ran that off the new ahrd disk it wouldn't install anything and i would lose all the music and documents.

try bootin it up without smart enabled thats what im doin and it seems to work altho one of my partitions is unsuaable maybe you might be able to get into windows without smart enabled and back up copu of the impportant parts of your main drive

maybe i could try doing that, and loading up norton ghost onto it and backing it up to the new hard disk set to slave

i did find this program which installs itself onto a boot disk and then loads on bootup and allows me to backup entire hard disk to my new one, i will try that option as well

i am going to try this in the morning when i get home, thankyou all for your suggestions

 

[Stonehelm]

Yeh the PC world disks do format before they create a new install, so its definetly a last measure thing. I do recommend trying what i said tho.

Is it S-ATA or IDE btw?

*edit*

Nvm you already said about changing the jumpers so its IDE, SATA > IDE

 

[Ash]

Ye, computers from PC world usually all come with a OS disk, which will restore it to the "factory" settings. As stone said. ^^

Maybe there are some corrupted files on your old hdd, which are causing it not to function properly? if this is the case, i would reccomend you do not copy the files from it to the new hdd..just use the new hdd from scratch (buy a os install cd if needed, you can get them fairly cheap these days.)