Need help surviving a hard drive failure/upgrade

[CantFigureItOut]

Hi everyone,
I've skimmed through a number of posts, but I'm in a bit of a panic and can't seem to find anything that will help.

My 750gb Seagate is ready to go out at any time. HD Tune Pro considers it to be in failure already in 1 category and warnings on others. So to keep from having any data loss issues I have purchased a 1TB Western Digital hard drive that I want to move everything over to. I installed my new hard drive in the tower and it formats, windows can see it. I downloaded Macrium and figured I'd just do the clone of my old hard drive. At 99% I get an error for a bad pipe - 13. Did some research, seems to be a normal thing. So I created an image of my old hard drive, saved it to an external USB hard drive, booted into the Macrium PE and tried to restore the image to my new hard drive. The image completes successfully, however when I try to boot I get a BCD error. Tried using Macrium to fix the BCD error, but it doesn't work. I still get errors, I'm currently in the process of creating a new image with Macrium to try and restore, I'm hoping maybe something went wrong the first time.

I know I'm not giving specifics on the errors I'm getting...but I will just as soon as the new back up is done. Anyone care to weigh in so far?

I work from home on this computer and really need it up and ready to go for tomorrow, I've been battling this thing for 3 days running chkdsk on both the old hard drive prior to imaging, and then chkdsk on the new hard drive after I restored the image. When I ran chkdsk on the new hard drive after restoring the image, it deleted tons of indexing errors and other issues that it found.

Really hoping I can get this to work...

 

[Baddog22556]

I tried Macrium but prefer free Acronis True Image to make an image backup and restore as needed.
This is a free tool as long as you have a Western Digital Drive somewhere in the chain.
Seagate also offers free Acronis if Seagate is in the chain of drives.
Make an Acronis bootable start disk and follow user friendly gui.
Because I love to play and experiment this backup/restore image has proved invaluable.
It's pretty quick (depends on how much data you're working with. More data, more time needed.)
Download Acronis True Image

Good luck.

 

[CantFigureItOut]

Thanks I'll Acronis a try. I downloaded it at the same time I downloaded Macrium, but didn't try the Acronis yet...for some reason Macrium just gets my attention more. I'm dealing with about 400gb that I'm trying to back up...not a huge amount compared to some probably, but it is taking forever to image it.

 

[Baddog22556]

Yeah, you have over twice the data I have on mine. I like to keep it lean to make it quicker.
Seems with 1TB and higher capacity drives out we'd see some new backup software that can handle
the heat without taking forever to smoke. <1 hour times should be here one day.....

 

[CantFigureItOut]

Well good news, I was in the process of running a new back up with Macrium when I made my initial post. The back up finished earlier today, so I booted into the Macrium WinPE environment to give it a test...fully expecting I would get an error after I restored the image and I went to reboot. Much to my surprise, the image that I made and restored in Macrium this time worked. This is my first time replacing a hard drive, quite happy with the outcome, though I wish it wouldn't have taken me quite so long! I will definitely be thinning out some of my files and working to slim them all down a bit!

 

[Baddog22556]

Glad to hear that. If I remember correctly that's why I dumped Macrium for Acronis because
there seemed to be a glitch in the backup or restore a good percentage of the time. Others may
not experience this problem and go happily along their way. One size does not fit all do that's why
there are so many options out there. I never buy software because of free ones like this or open
source available. Got into a lot of arguments with other techs that swear free is not good. WRONG!
Paid editions just offer a lot more things it can do but does one really need them? Me? NO!