Win 7 System Restore from Recovery partition on failed HDD to new HDD?

[jamsoftheweek]

HDD is failing. I spent the last 16 hours reading the BSOD threads and decided to accept my fate. I can provide details if anyone is interested, but I've decided to replace the HDD. I'm posting here to run my plan by the experts in case it is incredibly stupid and would not work.

Problems:
-600gb of data not sufficiently backed up (last backup 6 months ago). I can access the data and save to another drive using the copy/paste method from the 'System Repair' menu, but 600gb to my external HDD over USB 2.0 (and with the drive in the state it is in) would take days.
-I cant find the recovery disk I made, but I have a partitioned recovery drive (on the failed HDD).

My response:
-Bought two internal HDDs.
-HDD1 will be installed and used to backup failed HDD because transferring to external HDD over USB 2.0 was very slow. (Is this an accurate assumption?)
-HDD2 will be installed and OS/drivers will be restored from failed HDD. (Can I do this?)
-failed HDD will be removed. HDD1 will be used as a backup drive or 'file server'.

Any thoughts, warnings, or words of wisdom?

 

[Kari]

Hi and welcome to the Seven Forums

A clean install to the new HDD would of course be better, but if you want to transfer your old Windows setup and if the failing HDD still allows you to boot to it, this tutorial offers a practical solution for transferring your old Windows to new HDD: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/135077-windows-7-installation-transfer-new-computer.html

Method Two in the tutorial is for your case. Use for instance free Macrium for imaging: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html

After a clean install or transferring Windows to the new HDD, connect the failing HDD to the same computer and do the copy/move & paste.

Kari

 

[jamsoftheweek]

Kari, thanks. That's a good idea. I have some concerns with unfamiliar services and processes running, so I'm not certain there isn't an OS issue in addition to the HDD. issue. so a clean install would be nice. But since I have an extra HDD, it wouldn't hurt to try and save a few hours.

 

[mjf]

If a faster way of backing up data is your main concern then if you don't have a USB3 interface another internal for rescue data backup may be reasonable. This tutorial may also be of interest:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/187346-robocopy-create-backup-script.html

I tend to use 1-2TB USB 3 externals for backups and assume your main HDD could totally fail the next time you turn your PC on. A mix of system images and fairly static data backup will get you out of trouble in the future. Keep you OS and installed program partition of a manageable size for imaging (~100-200GB). Keep your large data on a separate partition.

 

[whs]

You can download and burn the Macrium WinPE .iso from my Skydrive. With the burnt CD you can make an image of your drive and also recover the image to the new drive. Here is how:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html?ltr=I

It would be preferable if you could do the download and burn the CD on another PC - then you don't stress your fragile HDD.