I think we did wrong - cloning

Dell Inspiron 6000 notebook. Hard drive going out. Installed True Image 11. Choose to clone to an external 500gb HD. It's doing it now! What will it do? Will it copy or move? It won't wipe my C: drive will it? Then when we buy a new drive how do we get it from the external drive to the new one?

From reading the forum, it sounds like we should do an image.

Have we really messed up? My husband is doing it and he almost did the cleaner utility thinking that might help fix his HD. Good thing I was watching and reading. I almost had a heart attack.

 

The best way is to image to an external drive and then restore to the replacement drive that has replaced the old drive in the Inspiron.

See GroverH's sig in any of his posts for detailed instructions.
If you have any bad sectors on the old drive "Partition Restore with re-sizing" is the way to go as this ensures that the bad sector record is not repeated on the new drive. Only a modicum of re-sizing will do the job but you should leave the Dell partitions as they are.
Of course the new drive may be bigger so that this method should be used anyway.

Xpilot

Hope that now makes sense.
Xpilot

 

Thank you for replying.

When you say "Only a modicum of re-sizing will do the job but leave the Dell partitions as they are." Do you mean that "I" should leave the Dell partitions as they are or that the re-sizing will leave them? Actually I'm not sure I understand that sentence at all.

I'm pretty good at figuring computer things out, but it's 1:30 in the morning, so good night. Maybe tomorrow it will be clearer.

 

I have edited my post to make it clearer.

A further suggestion, send Hubby out for the day while you sort out the new disk .

Xpilot

 

Check my response to your other link.
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=246390

Cloning to an external disk has little chance of success.
Cloning from an external disk is much better also known as a reverse clone. But I prefer restoring images over cloning.

Cloning puts your source disk at risk for a user error or program malfunctions. See link below.

Clone or Restore using Resize comparison

 

Xpilot -

Thankyou again. And to GroverH for the V11 links, I just couldn't find them on Acronis website.

It took me a while to see what you edited. You added "you should". How should I?

Also so now I have a CLONED external 500gb HD from my internal 80gb. I guess it won't do me any good. So what should i do with the 500gb? Should I reformat the 500gb or can I just put the backup on it as it is?

I've printed out several of the pdfs and will be stumbling my way through them so don't go away this week. We still need to go to Fry's and get a new hard drive.

I guess I want to go this route instead of a fresh Win XP sp2 install and then have to get all the windows updates, drivers etc. Except my husband has had bad viruses in the past and I hope we don't just transfer his problems back on. We now are using NOD32 & MBAM. Computer is running real real slow. Could that be because the hard drive is having errors (like for the last year)?

Also....What about the hidden Dell factory restore partition? Will it be put on the new drive and be usable? Haven't ever used it and don't think I will.

Enough questions for now. Thank you again for helping me.

 

directions for the reverse clone.
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=209574
This will work in most cases and will copy all your hidden partitions.

If your windows is running real slow right now, the clone won't fix it. Any problems on the original drive will be transfered to the clone drive.

Is the original drive full? then transferring to a larger drive might help. Have you tried to defrag the old drive? That can speed up a heavily fragmented drive. Also ccleaner can remove unneeded registry entries.

If you already removed all your virus/malware and the computer is still slow, another problem might be your antispyware software that might be slowing you down. I've use webroot spyware sweeper and that software slow my computer too much. I now only use "returnil" when I'm on the internet as my antispyware, it doesn't slow the computer.

I think you might need to fix your windows first before you clone it.

 

Hi Volvogirl,

If you have truly done a clone process to an external drive I cannot see that it will be of any use to you. So you might as well format the usb drive to make it available to store backup( My Computer) images of the laptop.

Apart from slowness are there any other symptoms of imminent laptop drive failure?
You might make an image of the drive as it now is to keep in reserve and then I would suggest that you go through some clean up processes. These are not normally destructive but if the drive is on the point of failure who knows.
1. Boot the laptop in safe mode and then run a full updated anti virus scan followed by whatever MBAM does.
2. Run Windows disk clean up in normal mode ticking all the boxes apart from compressing old files. Before you press the OK button select the advanced tab and delete all system restore points apart from the latest one.
3. Run a defrag on the system/boot drive.
4. Run CHKDSK R on all the visible partitions. Examine the results in Windows admin tools / event viewer/ Applications / logon. Any bad sectors that are reported are a good indication that you have made the right choice to replace the drive.

The above will have cleaned up the drive and now you can make a fresh backup of the laptop drive in its tidier state.
Use this image to retore your complete system to the new drive that you have put in place of the old drive. A restore with re-sizing as mentioned previously is the way to go.

There are two good reasons for including the Dell partitions on your new drive. They are included in the MBR and if they are not brought forward you will run into boot problems. Secondly I presume that you do not have an install CD for your operating system, so if you ever had to go back factory fresh state and start over the Dell recovery partition would be the thing to use.
On the few Dells I have played with one of the Dell partitions have had a detailed set of manuals including including pictures and tip of how to replace its hard drive and add extra RAM.
This may well be something that may be well worth adding to speed up the computer.
Crucial.com will scan your laptop on line and will detail an exact match for right kind and amount of RAM that will suit your laptop.

Xpilot

 

THANK YOU FOR THE GREAT POST!

I am very organized AND do have all the OS & system disks from Dell for all my machines.

Yes the hard drive is having errors all the time. I don't know how we've been limping along for so long. It cashes a lot, Blue Screens, fatal errors, the event log has failures every day, mostly Event 7026 which I can't figure out or fix. Disk error 11 a lot. HD sometimes clicks. I've manage to get him back running, but any day now........ The HD is getting worse.

MS says error 11 is typically caused by a failing cable from the hd to pc. Haven't ever checked on that. Do laptops have cables? I guess we should pull out the hd and reseat it & see if that helps?