How to Replace your Dying Primary Hard Drive
Over a period of a week or two you realize your computer is freezing constantly. You check for obvious signs of hardware failure, like bloated motherboard capacitors, and check the cabling. You take a look at the Windows event viewer (type “eventvwr” in the run command) and under the system you notice a lot of hard drive errors.
After running a utility like HD Tune you realize your hard drive is on the fritz. If it’s something like a bad block, it can be “repaired” by reformatting you machine as Windows will write around this block and be marked as bad on a clean install. However a lot of times this is caused by something like the head of the hard drive causing damage to the platter, which usually means it’ll happen again.
So the best course of action is to replace that hard drive. Today we’ll be looking at what you should do for a typical hard drive failure on a desktop PC.”
1) Order a new hard drive.
Simple enough. It doesn’t have to be the exact same one, just make sure the bus in the same (IDE, SATA) and get the same size or larger drive to avoid any problems down the road.
2) Transfer your data to a new location.
While your waiting for the UPS guy to ring your doorbell, transfer all the data you have off the hard drive to a new one. The best way is to boot your computer from a UBCD4Win CD and run the Unstoppable Copier from it. Copy the ENTIRE drive to either an external hard drive, another hard drive on your computer, or a network location (such as a shared folder on another computer or a server if you have access to one). Grab some lunch it might take a while. Subway is good.
3) Install and format your your new hard drive.
I don’t really need to say too much about installing a new hard drive do I? Just swap the old one out and put the new one in. Boot into UBCD4Win again to format the drive. Right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”. In the Computer Managment window click on Disk Management.
The new hard drive should look like Disk 1 (however yours should be Disk 0 if it’s the only drive), it should be unallocated and void of anything. Right click on it and click “Format”. Run through the wizard and format as a logical drive with a primary partition. Name your hard drive (”Local Disk” is the norm) and check it to do a “Quick Format”. After the wizard is complete, UBCD will say you need to reboot. I’ve always avoided this by running through the format wizard again. Right click the drive and mark the drive as active. After that you should be able to right click on the drive that is showing at the top of the window and assign in the drive letter “C”. Go to My Computer and voila! Your hard drive is ready to be written to.
4) Transfer your data to the new hard drive
Run Unstoppable Copier again and copy your data from where you saved it to the new hard drive. Grab some lunch again.
5) Rebuild your boot.ini
After everything is done, reboot your computer and see if it loads. If it doesn’t you might have to rebuild your boot.ini file. This is especially true on Dell machines that have that little 50mb partition before the OS partition. Boot up UBCD4Win and at the main blue screen before you boot into your BartPE OS (the shell you are in when using UBCD) scroll down and launch the Windows Recovery Console. It’ll take a few minutes to boot, just follow the prompts on the screen when Windows setup asks what you want t do. When you are in select your windows installation and enter the local administrator password (if you can’t remember it or don’t know it you can use the password tools in your UBCD to create a new one). At the command prompt type “bootcfg /rebuild”. Enter these options:
Add installation to boot list?: Yes
Enter Load Identifier: Microsoft Windows (XP Home, Pro, Vista, Home, Business, Ultimate, whatever the name of your OS is)
Enter Operating System Load Options: (leave blank)
Type exit to reboot the machine.
There you have it. Windows should now boot properly and everything should look the way it did before. Windows might ask to reboot itself after it install you new hard drive drivers, so do so. If you are still having problems you might want to use the “fixboot” and “fixmbr” commands at the Recovery Console in case something messed up during your data transfers. The disaster you thought you had on your hands, wasn’t that bad was it?