Can True Image help me?

Yesterday, when my brother turned on his computer it started making a clacking noise, so he called me into his room. I've never heard a HD going bad but from what I've read, this was what it was supposed to sound like, so I had him shut down.

Since his computer has two hard drives, I needed to find out which one was making the noise. I disconnected the slave drive (just contains media files) and then turned on the computer again. Sure enough, as soon as I did, it started making the same noises again. Obviously that meant the hard drive containing the OS was going bad.

So right now, I'm trying to figure out a way to copy the contents of the primary drive to a new HD. Both the primary and secondary drive on his computer are almost full, with only a few gigs to spare on each of them. Since his computer is almost 6 years old, his motherboard only supports two hard drives being installed. I originally thought I could just move his hard drive to mine, hook it up as a slave, and copy the contents of it over to one of my hard drives. I then could take it out, pop in a new hard drive, and copy the contents back on to it. From what I've read though, it isn't as easy as that.

So my question is, can True Image help me copy the contents of the primary drive that is going bad onto a new hard drive? Also, the installation of XP on his system has three user accounts, all password-protected. Will that pose a problem? Thanks in advance.

 

Keep the original drive as the master, and put the new replacement drive as the slave.
Then clone the old drive over to the new one.
Then remove the old drive, put the new one as the master and make sure it boots OK.
Then reattach the old D drive back on as the slave.

 

I think I would also go with the cloning as described by MerlinAZ. From your description the drive could be in bad shape and I would not run it any more than necessary just in case it dies completely.

It could be that it is too late already such that there is unrecoverable data to the extent that TI can't make sense of it or even if it does, there is too much missing to make the clone useable. I know I don't have to say it but the time to make backups is when everything is working!

If you can't clone I doubt an image backup will be any more successful but you can try. If that doesn't work and the drive is still somewhat operational, I would determine what files I really would like to have such as maybe email, Favorites, personal files that aren't on the other drive, etc and copy them off.

 

Thanks for the replies.

Just wondering, will I be able to attempt the cloning with the trial version of TI or are there limitations to it?

 

Hello Xee,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Please be aware that the limitations of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home trial version are that you can only restore an image when you run the program from the bootable media. The trial version is fully functional in Windows. The trial version evaluation period is 15 days.

However, as seekforever said the hard drive may be damaged and there could be sectors on the drive that can not be read anymore. I would recommend that you take a look at this previous post of mine about backing up disk/partition that contains bad sectors.

Thank you.
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Aleksandr Isakov