replacing hard drive

[Popcorrin]

I am replacing the hard drive on my mame machine.  Is there a way to make an image of my old hard drive on my new hard drive so I don't have reinstall everything?

[stuzza]

Sure is.  Use Norton Ghost.

[eightbit]

Theres lots of image programs, some drives even come with them. I think western digital does or at least it used to.

[MiKman]

maxtor retail drives also come with a utility that formats the new drive and images the old drive to the new drive. Maxblast.  Where I used to swear by Maxtor because of the awesome warranty they had.  Every stinking one I have bought I had to send back for a replacement. Only 3 drives mind you but still 3 out of 3 sucks and they were all sent back within 2 months of the warranty being up.  what are the odds.

[paigeoliver]

Every modern (meaning larger than 2 GB) drive that I have ever had fail on me has been a Maxtor.

[dhansen]

I've had bad luck with the IBM Deathstar...er...Deskstar..  


Doug

[namzep]

I have an older Maxtor drive (13 GB/5400 RPM) that is still going strong after 5 years.  However, I purchased an 80 GB/7200 RPM drive that I have had nothing but problems with.  First, no matter what utility I used to format the drive I couldn't detect more than 32 GB (and, yes, I even updated my motherboards bios to no avail).  Recently, it's also started only working occasionally (every second or third boot).  I talked to a friend that had bought the same drive and he has had similar problems with it.  Can anyone suggest a hard drive brand (80gb or greater) that they run and have had no problems with?  Thanks in advance.  

[JoeU]

Currently I am running 2 100gb Western Digitals on my server in a raid 1 configuration and they have given me no problems at all.   I also have 2 80's in other machines and have had no problems to date.  I have only had 1 WD drive go bad on me.  It was a 500mb drive and it went
bad after 2.5 years.  Called WD and they sent me a 2gb drive.    Gotta love that.  

[JoeB]

One that I noticed is that drive reliability is now what it used to be.

When a few years ago you purchased a 1GB HD, you knew that the drive would die from being small one day rather than any physical failure.  

It's not the case any more.. drives are getting bigger, $$$ cheaper, and more cheaply made.

I bet the defect rate has never been as high as it is today..

[SirPeale]

I have an older Maxtor drive (13 GB/5400 RPM) that is still going strong after 5 years.  However, I purchased an 80 GB/7200 RPM drive that I have had nothing but problems with.  First, no matter what utility I used to format the drive I couldn't detect more than 32 GB (and, yes, I even updated my motherboards bios to no avail).  Recently, it's also started only working occasionally (every second or third boot).  I talked to a friend that had bought the same drive and he has had similar problems with it.  Can anyone suggest a hard drive brand (80gb or greater) that they run and have had no problems with?  

Was that also a Maxtor drive?  I've got an 80G that I'm having problems with as well.  It seems like doesn't want to access certain portions of the platters themselves.  I was having problems with it, and I repartitioned it and reformatted.  I had noticilbly fewer problems, but once you were trying to read/write to that one part of the drive, forgetaboutit.

[eightbit]

One that I noticed is that drive reliability is now what it used to be.

When a few years ago you purchased a 1GB HD, you knew that the drive would die from being small one day rather than any physical failure.  

It's not the case any more.. drives are getting bigger, $$$ cheaper, and more cheaply made.

I bet the defect rate has never been as high as it is today..

They have never run faster with more platters and more heads than they ever did before. It is quite incredible if you understand how they work that they don't fail more often. If you think todays drives are less reliable than old drives, go back a little older. Drives used to really suck and failed regularly. I just threw away the platters from a 10gb drive. The platters were as big as a large pizza and it was about 9 inches tall. I should have taken a picture of that thing.

[Nailz]

I just did this with a new Western Digital hard drive.  I had trouble as XP acted like a complete bastard as do all Microsoft products and would not boot up, kept giving me a error with the registration.

So....  I ended using the tools to copy the image, I then re-installed my OS, making sure I had backed up "My Documents" folder" and my .pst file.  When I was finished, I dropped these back in place and I was done except for the updating of Windows, Office, etc.

All in all a real pain in the ass.  In short, if you can, invest in Ghost or something similar, the tools with my hard drive, kinda sucked.

[caykroyd]

Ghost didn't work a whole lot better for me.  Did a disk to disk clone, but after trying to boot up on new drive, XP would not work.  couldn't find a solution, so what i did was kept the clone, but did a "repair" with the XP disk.  Now all seems to work fine.  I belive it also had to do with XP registration.  

[JoeU]

I had similiar problems.  What I eneded up doing was taking a CD, downloading virtual linux (http://sourceforge.net/projects/virtual-linux/) and then burning that to a cd.  Put both drives into the machine and then dd'd one drive to another.  Worked great when I booted back into XP.  Course there were some minor issues with drive letters as XP hashes the HD serial number to get the hash used for drive letters, but nothing that mmc couldn't fix.  If the drives arn't the same, you could always just use a simple tar from one drive to the next.    

[JoeB]

Folks,

one thing I tend to do when ever I buy an HD or buy RAM is run extensive tests on them.

For HD's, go to the manufacturer web site.. they have great boot disk images that will test byte by byte the entire HD.

As for RAM, there's a boot disk called memtest86.. using this thing I found a defective 256MB chip! YUP! RAM can go bad!