This guy.
Posted on 10/21/2010 6:08:31 PM PDT by dayglored
This guy.
And don't forget the asbestos underwear!
Thanks for the advice, I understand both of your reasoning, and the new hard-drive is a given, but there are a number of reasons why at this time I need to just upgrade the old system, starting with the time involved. I use an incredible number of unique utilities, custom macros and supplemental plugins. In six months I plan on doing a clean install on a new machine at my leisure. I'm doing this now to just get me through a really busy time.
Hate to break it to you, but as a semi-IT guy, the LAST time I’d even think about a system upgrade is when I’m really busy. The odds of something going bad are small, but you know Murphy...
If you don’t have the time to do it correctly right now, then don’t do it at all. Unless you’re willing to spend a day rebuilding things if they go sideways.
And if your HDD is acting up, I’d do it in a hurry - as you point out, the value isn’t in the hardware, it’s in the custom stuff and data on that HDD!
Perhaps your best option would be to use Norton Ghost - image your current disk to an external HDD. Then install the new HDD, and restore the image. At least your hardware would be a bit more stable if you insist on going through with an upgrade at a critical time.
That was my plan.
Sorry weigh in late, but yes Puget's right and your plan is the right one.
My team uses Ghost (or its moral equivalent from Acronis, O&O, and others) all the time for migrations between hardware.
The only thing we've found that's more reliable for copying a hard drive -- because it doesn't try to be intelligent -- is to mount up another identical drive (either internal or USB external), boot up from a Linux LiveCD, and use the Unix/Linux utility "dd" to copy sector-wise from one drive to the other. It's dumb -- it has to copy all the free space along with the data -- but it's 100% reliable and unlike the smarter products, it copies fancy partitioning managers, multi-boot managers, foreign operating systems, and other esoterica perfectly.
But if you're not comfortable with command lines like:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/sdcstick with Ghost.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.