Hi guys I currently have a 2TB WD harddrive which I think is dying and everything I have is on there. Is there anyway of just copying everything to the a new one (which I'll eventually get) or should I just copy my movies, photos and music and install a fresh Windows on the new harddrive?
It's just gone slow as frik. It's currently doing a disc check, so I'll try what you suggested tomorrow.
If in doubt swap it out. Disk is cheap. Analysis tools can get it wrong. You can clone the drive using freeware like TodoBackup. I always recommend using free online services for critical data, like Skydrive, Dropbox or Google, then if a disk shits, who cares? If you're paranoid about cloud, do what I do and use Truecrypt containers. If there's nothing wrong with the existing disk you can use it for backups too. You can never have enough redundancy, trouble is folk don't often realise til it's too late.
Thanks Pollushon, I let the disk check run over night. Before that I tried to defrag, but it says the disk has errors. I've just turned on my PC and now I've tried to defrag it again to see if there was still errors, but now it's working! Looks like it just needed a mass cleanup of files and what not. I'll still probably end up buy another harddrive, because why not? Haha 12 harddrive slots. Thanks again.
task scheduler is your friend..... defrags should be done on a regular basis if you constantly move files around and install and uninstall ****. Winblows default defrag is not too bad for most people.
Windows 7 and 8 defrag in the background. When I know a hard drive is dodgy I use Unstoppable Copier. Will detect errors and let you know so you can continue or skip files etc.
Lol that's all I've been using. (The pro version) Edit: Just installed Unstoppable Copier 5.2. How do I scan C drive?
As Wraith said Windows 7 and 8 can be just left to their own devices, they do a decent enough job of organisation and are clever enough to leave SSD's alone. In cases where you're storing multimedia, like movies TV shows and music, fragmentation rarely becomes an issue as they are (often large) contiguous blocks. AVG Tune Up and UC are two different things. AVG Tune Up is rubbish, the W7/8/8.1 OS is good enough to manage and 'optimise' itself. UC I've used before it's quite good, but I tend to go with *nix based live boots that do raw copies nicely or in desperate times Q&X. That said my speciality is EMC storage (Symmetrix, CLARiiON) and backups (Avamar, Networker, TSM) so I've never found myself in a predicament because I'm storage redundancy and backup autistic
Wow I have no idea what you are talking about lol. Sorry, I'm not that much of a computer wiz, but usually learn new stuff when things go wrong. How do I use UC?
Sorry man. Jist of my advice is; be preventative, not reactive. Grab a spare drive, cloud account, then backup stuff important to you. Sure all the tools in the world are great at insight and analysis, but when **** happens sometimes it just goes boom. Not sure you need UC at this stage, you'd only use it to copy files from a physically dying HDD. We haven't ascertained yours is dying, have we?
All good. I like preventing stuff before they get worse. And the harddrive seems to be back to normal operation after scanning registries and what not. Thanks for your help.
HDD Scan - excellent tool. Hasn't let me down, and every time it's found an error the disk ends up dying. Run a S.M.A.R.T check on your disk with it, if you get any errors then replace the disk. If it comes clean run a surface test and see if you've got any bad blocks, if you have bad blocks then replace the disk.
