Solved Cloning Primary Partition Drive

[edawood]

I have a Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit system running a Dual Core 2.3ghz processor with 4mb ram.

I have some bad cluster problems with my primary drive C. Sometimes I get the blue screen of death, and an automatic reboot. In the reboot, the system goes through a chkdisk procedure and reports on several bad clusters. The drive is a 1tb drive partitioned into two sections 1 section is 124,2 gb (the boot section) and an 807.39 gb secondary drive labeled drive F. This is a Western Digital SATA drive.

I recently purchased a second 1tb Toshiba SATA drive, and cloned my drive C to the new Drive D. I used the freeware version of the program HDClone to do the job. The new drive D is an exact clone of drive C. There are two partitions D = 124.2gb, and E = 807.39gb. During the cloning, there were some sectors that contained the bad clusters that were not transferred to Drive D. However, so far, I have not discovered any major programs that are not operating as they should. If I discover a minor glitch, I think I can reinstall that program and solve the problem.

I have checked the new cloned drive, and it seems to work fine. I tested it by disconnecting the original boot drive C from the system and rebooting. Everything went good, however a little loss in speed. I then ran Win 7 repair disk on drive D. The repair program found some errors and repaired them. When I then retested drive D, it seems to now run at the same speed as the old Drive C ran at.

I plan to reformat the old Drive C, and let the format mark the bad clusters as unusable so that I can remove the blue screen of death problem. My concern is this:

Under disk management the description of the two physical drives are as follows:

Volume Layout Type File System Status
Drive C: Simple Basic NTFS Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Active,
Crash Dump, Primary Petetion)
Drive D: Simple Basic NTFS Healthy (Active, Primary Petition)

Since drive D does not register that it is a System and/or Boot drive with parameters of Page File and Crash Dump, will there be any problems down the road if those parameters are missing.

My goal is to make drive D my new drive C with a drive D partition, and the older drive (presently drive C) my secondary drive E with a drive F partition. Will just renaming the drives in disk management accomplish this goal, or is there a more correct way to rename the drives?

Thanks for any and all help.
Regards,
Ed Wood

 

[Mark Phelps]

...I have checked the new cloned drive, and it seems to work fine. I tested it by disconnecting the original boot drive C from the system and rebooting. Everything went good, however a little loss in speed. I then ran Win 7 repair disk on drive D. The repair program found some errors and repaired them. When I then retested drive D, it seems to now run at the same speed as the old Drive C ran at.

Not good ... slow drive performance CAN be an early indication of impending drive failure -- as the OS tries to read the same (failing) sector over and over and over, until it either succeeds, or gives up. The new drive isn't by any chance a Western Digital, is it? I've had three new ones fail on me this year.

My goal is to make drive D my new drive C with a drive D partition, and the older drive (presently drive C) my secondary drive E with a drive F partition. Will just renaming the drives in disk management accomplish this goal, or is there a more correct way to rename the drives?

Win7 automatically considers the OS "drive" as C: -- so I wouldn't "name" it that (if you mean, the drive Label); instead, I would name it something like "OS-Vol". Windows will assign it the drive letter of "C" when it boots.

Would do the same with the names of the other volumes -- use something that indicates the purpose of the volume, not the drive letter assigned.

 

[edawood]

Mark,

Thanks for the good input/advice. I guess I am used to the old method of seeing specific drive letters in Windows Explorer (e.g. Drive C:, Drive D:, Drive E:, etc.) and did not understand the concept of the functional labling under Windows 7+.

No, the new drive is not a WD drive. It is a Toshiba. However, the old drive is a WD. I have had it probably less than a year. In fact, the two 500gb drives that recemtly went south were WD drives. WD used to be a good drive. It seems like that is no longer the case.

I also have a 1tb external drive. It is a Segate. However, it automatically goes into "Sleep" mode after about 30 minutes. I suppose that saves the bearings in the drive, but it presents problems for some software that seems to be "impatient" in waiting for the drive to wake up, and aborts or freezes up.

Have a great weekend@
Ed Wood