Installing a New Hard Drive

[okwrangler2003]

I have a Compaq CQ57. The hard drive is beginning to act funny. Is there any way I can transfer everything off my old hard to a new hard drive? I mean everything including the operating system. Compaq does not give you the operating system on discs. You have to buy them and they don't work. Ask me how I know.


Thank you

 

[wither 2]

Do you think it's the hard drive or the OS? Exactly what's happening?

 

[okwrangler2003]

Sometimes it stalls, sometimes it won't respond, it is eight years old.


Thank you for answering me

 

[johnhoh]

At this point you don't have enough evidence to conclude that the problem is the hard drive, but to answer your question, yes.

Transferring everything to a new drive is called cloning. You buy a new hard drive, hook it up to your computer while it is off, boot the computer into windows still using the old hard drive as your boot drive, then use a free program called macrium reflect (can download it from many sites) to clone the old drive onto the new drive, shutdown the computer, remove the old hard drive, boot from your new hard drive and you are good to go.

 

[samuria]

The problem is if the drive is failing and has had sectors a clone will copy bad sectors to the new hard drive and not reversals second if it had windows may be corrupted any way. Have you actually tested the drive for errors and checked the event logs?

 

[Paul Black]

Hi okwrangler2003,

As samuria has pointed out, if you have HDD problems, they will get cloned as well!

Other Considerations

It might be a good idea to do a bit of an OS cleanup before you perform the cloning.

You can uninstall any programs that are not needed [and you are not going to use]. You can run Disk Cleanup - Extended. You can Defragment etc. These will help speed up the cloning process when you come to cloning.

You could also run chkdsk C: /R [Check Disk] which is a Windows utility program for detecting and repairing any corruptions of the file system [FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS drives] like bad sectors etc. If you don’t run this, and you do have any bad sectors, they will obviously be cloned across to the new SSD.

You could also run sfc /scannow [System File Checker] which is a Windows utility program for detecting and repairing any corruptions in the protected system files of the Windows OS. If any files are missing or corrupted, they are replaced with a cached copy that is located in a compressed folder at %WinDir%\System32\dllcache. The %WinDir% placeholder represents the Windows OS folder C:\Windows\.

I hope this helps!

 

[cornemuse]

Good idea to backup all your data first of all