Off topic - Hard Drive imaging

Hi, this is not about HCPC's but I know a lot of you guys are PC savvy so wonder if you can help.

I have a Sony laptop that is making an infuriating whining noise. I suspect this is the hard drive as it stops if you set the hard drive to turn itself off. It is getting steadilly worse. Either that, or the cooling fan only runs when the hard drive does.

I have just installed XP Pro on it which has taken about a day to set everything up again and am not keen on doing it again.


Firstly, where is the best place to source a new hard drive? Is it a pro job to fit (I have built a few desktops)? Also, would it be possibly to just image my current HDD across to a new one to avoid the OS installion headache? If so, how would this be done?

Any ideas?

[Sinzer]

I bought my last HD from www.dabs.com (free P&P for orders over £50). Best places to look are the standard places www.scan.co.uk, www.simply.co.uk, www.overclockers.co.uk.

I would recommend the Maxtors or Seagates, there have been problems with IBM (mine died on me ) and I have a friend who went through a load of Western Digitals.

Make you sure you get a 7200 RPM (you could opt for 5200 if you wanted it to be a little quieter), with at least a 2Meg buffer. As for fitting, simply open the case, screw the HD into a bay, attach the IDE cable and make sure you have the correct jumper setting (Master if it is on it's own or with the DVD). If it will be your primary then set to Master, do not use Slave.

As far as imaging goes, I looked into it, but it really required purchasing professional software, I couldn't be bothered so I just did a fresh reinstall.

[Mark Grant]

Hello Paiger,

I dont know much about laptop hard drives, but I doubt you will find a 7200 rpm. I would buy a similar speed to what is installed, maybe larger capacity if required.

http://www.komplett.co.uk is a good supplier.


To image the drive, use Norton Ghost, you should have no trouble finding it

Everyone building PC's should learn how to ghost a drive, makes life so much easier.

You can connect the laptop 2.5" drive to your desktop PC with an adapter, only cost a few pounds, makes formatting and ghosting etc much easier on a 'real' PC than the laptop keyboard.

Good luck,

Mark.

[feet14]

A free alternative to ghost would be to download a copy of xxcopy from www.xxcopy.com. It works like an enhanced version of the DOS command xcopy. You run it in a DOS box so it accesses the HD at normal speed (rather than using in DOS mode where HD access is v. slow!).

xxcopy has a clone option but this automatically overwrites anything in the destination path you specify, which is a bit dangerous. I recommend ensuring there are no files in the destination path and using the following syntax:

xxcopy c:\ d:\ /ks /h /e /bi /ze

where C is your current HD and D is the new one. Make sure you run it when you've closed everything but explorer and systray in the Close Program box. You should get just one error - the swapfile, because it's always in use. It doesn't need to be copied.

When it's all done and the new disk is in your laptop, you will need to boot it up with an emergency boot disk. At the command prompt type in C: and press enter. Then type in fdisk /mbr. Remove the floppy, reboot and it should come up like it was before!

So, are laptop hard drives just standard 2.5" IDE drives or do I need a dedicated SOny drive for my machine?

S