Hard Drive Disasters
A few days ago I started getting S.M.A.R.T warnings on bootup, and my hard drive suddenly seemed to be running a lot slower. So I called up my hardware guy and ordered another hard-drive. Got a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda. Maybe not the best choice as the drive that was failing was a 500 GB Seagate Barracuda that was just about a year old. But what the hell, in the past Seagate has served me well so lets give them another chance.
The last time I had a hard drive conk out on me I had to have the hardware guy take it and recover the data. Ended up with a lot of corrupted files and had to reinstall everything from scratch.
This time, thanks to S.M.A.R.T I had a bit of warning before the crash and the data on the drive was still accessible so I decided to clone the drive. Found a bunch of free tools but a lot of them duplicated the partitions, so I would end up with the same partition sizes as before, and when you're doubling the size of your hard drive there's not much sense in that.
Then I came across a free tool called XXClone.
This promised to clone my hard drive without having to have the same size partition, so I decided to give it a shot. Popped the new drive into an external case, and started the cloning process. Worked really well. Ended up not having to reinstall anything, which was a real relief.
The only problem was that while my system partition was only taking up about 20 GB of space, the cloning process still took a really long time, I ended up going to sleep and let it run unattended, so I'm not sure exactly how long it took, but definitely more than 3 hours. This was probably not the Software's fault though as my original hard drive was running slowly.
The last time I had a hard drive conk out on me I had to have the hardware guy take it and recover the data. Ended up with a lot of corrupted files and had to reinstall everything from scratch.
This time, thanks to S.M.A.R.T I had a bit of warning before the crash and the data on the drive was still accessible so I decided to clone the drive. Found a bunch of free tools but a lot of them duplicated the partitions, so I would end up with the same partition sizes as before, and when you're doubling the size of your hard drive there's not much sense in that.
Then I came across a free tool called XXClone.
This promised to clone my hard drive without having to have the same size partition, so I decided to give it a shot. Popped the new drive into an external case, and started the cloning process. Worked really well. Ended up not having to reinstall anything, which was a real relief.
The only problem was that while my system partition was only taking up about 20 GB of space, the cloning process still took a really long time, I ended up going to sleep and let it run unattended, so I'm not sure exactly how long it took, but definitely more than 3 hours. This was probably not the Software's fault though as my original hard drive was running slowly.
posted by r at 7:11 AM
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