Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with harddrives

Clear a hard-drive, copy another onto it, then clear that other drive

The Devil Tesla — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:41:26 -0800

Looking for step by step instructions on how to clear a hard drive and then copy one drive (that boots Windows 7) to that drive I just cleared, then clear the old boot drive. My case currently has two drives, one connected by SATA and the other by PATA. Though this wasn't my intention, when I upgraded from Vista 32-bit to Windows 7 64-bit my old boot drive, the SATA one, was left untouched and the new OS was installed on the PATA drive.

I would really like to switch things around so the SATA drive is the boot drive and the PATA one is secondary, like it used to be. This is because the PATA one is a lot older than the SATA one. Everything on the SATA drive (the secondary one at the moment) is expendable and I'd like to clear that and then copy the currently bootable PATA one to the SATA drive and then clear it, resulting in the SATA drive being the primary one and the PATA being a big blank secondary drive.

I know next to nothing about this kind of thing, so I would be eternally grateful if someone could point me to the software I need to be able to do this and how I would set up this kind of operation on it. I've gotten a vague sense of how I should do this from other AskMes and a few howtos, but I'm not confidant yet that I could do it and nothing would go wrong.

Also, I'd much prefer if I could do this without buying any more hardware or software. I do have blank cds, dvds and a flash drive.

In a perfect world the solution would be to set things up, press go, and then walk away for a while until it's done, but yea, any help you can give me would make me super happy.

I can see the solution to this problem taking a bit more effort than some AskMes. If it does (or hell, even if it doesn't but you give me the information I need) I will e-mail you ten adorable pictures of bunnies as a thank-you gift.

Any good (i.e. customer service wise/price wise) UK/Euro equivalents of sites like newegg for shopping for external hard drives?

talljamal — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:43:24 -0800

Any good (i.e. customer service wise/price wise) UK/Euro equivalents of sites like newegg for shopping for external hard drives? My cousin's production company, which I'm working for, is looking for good hard drives (>150GB) at a good price to backup video footage... I always liked newegg, but the shipping over the Atlantic plus customs costs don't make it such a good idea.

Can the hive recommend any sites that you've had good experience with that are Europe based, especially UK? This will ease our shipping and customs costs to our nearby land, and help a fledgling company in these times of strapped budgets!

Thanks in advance for your time and advice :)

I hope AskMe 120389 has replies within the specified period

Gyan — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:34:40 -0800

My replacement hard drive went bad after just one day. I think the motherboard's the culprit. Need informed opinions. Long story follows--> Computer X (mobo G31M-S2L) had two hard drives A & B. A's first partition has XP SP2. B's first partition had "Program Files" (due to a custom XP install that went not quite as intended). About a month back, two things started happening: 1)Opening the Explorer replacement file manager started taking some time (30 secs), as opposed to happening almost immediately. 2)I started getting random but infrequent BSOD for "Page fault in non-paged area". So I ran a few passes of Memtest86+ and found no errors. I also successfully ran the CPU stress test included in the handy boot CD I had. I never had an application crash on me during some intensive task or otherwise. So I looked up the logs and found a huge number of errors coded 9 & 7 (ideport timeout & bad block). I connected HDD B to another SATA connector using a new cable, but the errors persisted. So I ran full diagnostics on both drives using the manufacturer's utilities. As expected, A (Hitachi) showed no errors and B (Seagate) showed quite a few errors. I asked my dealer to get B replaced under warranty. Its replacement C arrived day before yesterday. In the interim, X ran fine without any hiccups i.e. no BSOD or temporary freezes..etc. First thing I did upon getting C was run SeaTools Long Test, just like with B. No errors. So that night, I started to backup data from A onto C, so I could perform a proper reinstall of XP after repartitioning A. At first, the copying progressed smoothly, but then events similar to with B recurred. A 700 MB file would start copying normally at 32MB/s, but would stop in the middle for 10 seconds and then resume copying without further halts. Some files would copy at under 1MB/s. After one batch of files had been copied, I decided to copy them back from B onto some temp space on A and unsurprisingly I got CRC errors on quite a few but not all. I ran SeaTools Long again and this time 26 'errors' showed up (and were reported as repaired successfully). Surprised that an apparently error-free HDD should go bad so soon, I placed C in computer Y and played around with transferring data to & fro. After shuffling about 100+ GB, there's been no hint of error.

I arrived at the inference that the new HDD C isn't bad after all, and probably neither was B (in the initial stages atleast). I should point out that I checked SMART periodically and never has it been reported as tripped by A, B or C.

So, I see the possibilities as

1)problem with XP drivers (unlikely, since B was working fine before)
2)problem developed in the motherboard (most likely)
3)the new drive C is indeed bad of its own craftmanship.
4)power supply problems in X (unlikely; the other drive or devices have never shown a problem)

What is the best personal data backup scheme?

burnfirewalls — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:06:04 -0800

My data backup procedure is in shambles. What is the best personal data backup scheme to protect my data? My data backup procedure is in shambles, which is partly my fault and partly some ongoing hardware issues. I'll do my best to detail the issues. I've gone through Ask MeFi but I can't find a recent, definitive answer.

I've got a Windows XP desktop, which is the only reliable computer in the house. I've attached two identical external hard drives, each 500 GB. Until now, we've (Mrs. burnfirewalls and I) been saving everything important to one of the external hard drives, and then I manually copy all of that over to the second hard drive once a week or so.

This provides no data redundancy, in the case that the files on the first drive get corrupted.

The backup is also dependent on the operator (me) not being lazy.

Compounding the problem is that my computer will routinely not recognize the USB drives - every other time my computer is booted, it hangs in BIOS loading until I unplug the drives, and I have to then unplug and replug the power cords on the USB hard drives after Windows is booted. I also have issues with other USB devices. If I don't plug my printer into the exact same USB port every time, it re-installs the drivers. The two issues may not be related, but I wanted to include relevant details and not jump to conclusions.

I also need to retrieve the files off of three old devices - an unreliable Sony Vaio laptop, an old external hard drive, and an old internal hard drive - and incorporate the files into my backup. This is not a major issue since I have external hard drives, but, again, I want to lay out the whole problem.

The things that I absolutely need to protect from hard drive failure, file corruption, and my apartment building setting on fire are my personal photos/videos, my writing, my wife's project folder, and our website backups. Commercial music, videos, and all that shit is much, much less of a priority.

So, in short, what are your recommendations for automatic backup software (points if it doesn't require me to use said backup software to retrieve files later), offsite backups, and anything else that will keep my data safe?

Money's not a huge obstacle if it means an end to my anxiety over this!

To RAID or not to RAID?

jluce50 — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:09:10 -0800

I just purchased two WD Caviar Black 500GB HDDs and I'm trying to figure out the best backup configuration for my home computer. Previously, I had two 160GB drives. On HDD-0 I had a partition for my OS and a partition for data. HDD-1 was used solely for backups. I used Acronis to do separate backups of the OS and data partitions. In addition to this I backup most of my data online with JungleDisk.

With the new drives I'm trying to decide if I should continue doing the same thing or set them up in a RAID 1. RAID 1 sounds great, but I keep reading that the the only reason to do RAID 1 is if you're concerned about maintaining server-level uptime. I don't care so much about uptime as protecting against HDD failure. I realize RAID 1 is not a "backup" solution, per se, but I do have online backups to cover that. Performance isn't an issue as long as I'm not losing too much speed compared to a single drive.

The advantage that I can see to my current setup is that if I get a virus or something gets corrupted I still have the backup locally and can restore from that, whereas a RAID will instantly copy the virus/corruption to the mirrored disk. I'm pretty careful so I see that as a pretty darn unlikely scenario.

Other than that it seems like RAID 1 is ideal here, but is there anything I'm failing to consider? I rarely see it recommended for home use so I want to make sure I'm not missing anything.

Am I stupid to buy OEM Hard Drives?

melorama — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:47:57 -0800

I need advice on the reliability and economics of buying OEM Hard Drives in bulk. Is it false economy? I work for a video & film production company that generates a ton of data every month, now that tapeless video acquisition is the norm, and not the exception. We used to go out to BestBuy every so often and pick up a cheap external Firewire or USB drive that we'd archive our project data off to and the end of a job.

But it quickly became apparent that the external FW/USB drive route was clunky and inefficient. The varying form-factors of the drive enclosures and incredibly annoying powersupply juggling (we'd use bus-powered drives if they were big enough and fast enough to dump all our data, which they generally arent) caused me to investigate other options.

I came up with a plan to buy a NexStar FW/USB Hard drive dock for all of our editor's workstations, and buy bulk 3.5" 1TB SATA bare drives that they can just plug into the docks and dump off the data. Then we'd put the drives into our media vault using something like these Wiebetech Protective Harddrive cases (or a cheaper, reasonable facsimile).

(We backup all this data to LTO-3 tapes, as well, for redundancy. I trust neither tape nor spinning platters of glass & metal on their own, but together, I think it's as solid a backup plan as our budget allows for)

So now the question is, what hard drives do I buy? Since we generate at least 2-3 terabytes of backup data a month, I think we'd have to buy the drives in bulk in order to get any level of economy from this plan (preferably in lots of 10 at any single time, in case drive prices fluctuate). I noticed that on sites like NewEgg.com, the prices for "OEM" drives are significantly cheaper than their retail boxed counterparts. That's fine with me, as I dont need any of the screws, brackets, cables or software that the retail units ship with.

What's disconcerting to me, however, are the seemingly large number of negative reviews about these OEM drives, in particular, this Seagate Barracuda 1TB drive (I always buy Seagate by default, mostly out of superstition, but also because I've had many more memorable drive failures with Western Digital and Maxtor drives. But I'm more than willing to be convinced otherwise).

Is this a classic case of "only people with problems post product reviews on the internet", or are these OEM drives really inherently sub-par to the retail versions?

Any advice, info or pointers to better bargains are most appreciated!

Help Me Set Up Auto Backup on a 10.4 Mac

sjuhawk31 — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 10:31:35 -0800

BackupFilter: My boss has a Seagate FreeAgent external drive attached to her Macbook Pro. Using the drive manager software that came with it, I set up scheduled backups for her on MWF at noon. Problem is, it doesn't follow the schedule and won't back up at all. I've already lost a battle with IT to have Leopard installed on the office computers, so I'm trying to find a way to let my non-savvy coworkers do automatic backups. I thought this was the solution. Where am I going wrong?

My best guess is that you have to have the program open for it to run the scheduled backup. But doesn't that defeat the purpose of the schedule?

I'd really like to not invoke other software, if possible.

Portable Hard Drive Recs

spicynuts — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:08:10 -0800

Need recommendations for portable hard drives. The reviews on newegg and amazon are too rah rah or doomsday. I would like to get a 250GB portable hard drive to dump my RAW and PSD files and my music files into so as to free up space on my main computer hard drive. I've been looking at the LaCie portables. Most of the reviews on newegg and amazon are either 'this is fantastic' or 'this thing is crap it died in two days'. I have no way to judge criteria other than what I read in those reviews. Does anyone have any experience with the LaCie hard drives or other brands that may be more reliable/better deals? I need something that is easy to set up and will be reliable over the long term. It is just a dumping ground - back up.

External vs internal hard drives and speed

xmutex — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 12:21:09 -0800

Please explain to me how a 7200rpm SATA external hard drive (USB 2 or Firewire 800) can be written to / read from as expediently as a 7200 RPM SATA internal hard drive? It doesn't seem to make sense. Isn't the USB/Firewire a bottleneck? Why would an external drive be as suitable for audio recording as an internal?

Am I working my poor little drive too hard?

melissam — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:16:51 -0800

Am I running my completely enclosed HD into the ground? I love my Lacie rugged. I've had it for about a year, it's nicely portable, and it has worked without a hitch so far. I run my Itunes off it, as well as portable firefox. However, given that the enclosure is well...completely enclosed (no fans, no holes), and it doesn't have SMART, so I have no idea what temperature it is. Sometimes I worry that it was just meant for storage and not to run things off of...am I dooming the poor thing?

Gillware - good or bad?

matildaben — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 15:42:06 -0800

Does anyone have experiences with Gillware for recovering data from a dead hard drive, aside from user bhance? They are cheaper than the big enterprise-level data recovery companies, but I'd like to see comments from more than one person if possible.

amateur hard drive swap, or road to sorrow?

Admiral Haddock — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 13:06:06 -0800

Can/should I re-use the enclosure for a hard drive I have outgrown as a housing for a new hard drive, or should I just buy new? Either way, what should I be buying? I have a MacBook, and I need more storage (looking for 500GB to 1TB). I have a credit with the Apple Store, and I had been thinking about the 500 GB G-Drive. Call me flighty, but its most recent review was negative, and I got a little spooked. I searched the various older posts on the green, and nothing quite addressed this situation. I would be using the drive for backup and storage of media files.

Then I got to thinking, why buy a pre-made unit, when I have a perfectly usable enclosure with a too-small hard drive in it? The enclosure was for a firewire LaCie Studio Drive (circa 2002). The drive inside is an 80GB IBM Deskstar Ultra ATA/100 EIDE drive. The G-Drive would have been $300 at Apple. A 500 GB Seagate drive is just $125 or so at NewEgg.com.

I am comfortable with a simple swap and setting jumpers etc. What I don't know is:

1) whether ultra ATA / EIDE is a current technology or some relic that I should avoid;

2) what the difference is, if any, between EIDE and IDE and whether they are compatible etc.;

3) if I just add my own drive, what drives are good/bad? Is Seagate OK?;

4) would it be better to start fresh (i.e., not with a 5 year old enclosure)? If so, what enclosures would be good? USB 2 might be preferable, as I would like to set it up with one of the new airport base stations that allow a networked drive via USB 2.

5) is this just a dumb idea?

Thanks in advance.

How to get my old copy of XP to work on a new Mac?

smithmac_99 — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 13:41:54 -0800

When I buy my new 24" imac, should I keep my PC and use it as a server, buy a hard drive enclosure, or just scrap my old PC? I don't really need the storage, but I don't really want to get rid of my PC or my hard drives. I'd like to keep a working copy of XP around and use parallels for MSOffice and some games and things. Here are some other questions to consider: 1) Will Parallels work if XP isn't on the mac, but on the PC connected via a network? Or will it work if I pull the hard drives from the PC and put them in an external enclosure? I REFUSE to buy another copy of Windows and I don't have install disks for XP, just the restore ones that came with my OEM XP Pro. So basically, how do I get XP to run on my new mac? Thanks guys.

External Mac Fire Wire Drives

captainscared — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 12:50:26 -0800

What's the best option for external Mac Fire Wire Drives? I have GBs of music and video. And I do Final Cut editing. I'm looking for a high-end solution but not RAID or SATA. I am considering either the G-Drive Q or the G-Drive, both from g-tech. (anyone happen to know if there's a performace difference between those two?)

Thanks.

NTLOADER is missing.

Effigy2000 — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 21:20:53 -0800

I have two SATA drives installed on my machine. My computer works fine except for the fact that roughly every two or three weeks my computer will fail to boot with a message reading "NTLOADER is missing. Press CTRL ALT DEL to reboot." I can fix the problem temporarily by opening up my computer case and swapping the drives around on the motherboard (putting the cable for Drive 1 into SATA 2 and vice versa), at which point Windows will boot up fine and function without a problem but as I said, within the space of two to three weeks, the problem comes back. Hope me, please! System specs inside. The System.

* AMD Athlon64 x2 4600 operating at 2.6Ghz with a 512k Cache.

* Motherboard: ASUS M2N32-SLi Deluxe.

* Big cool case with lots of room inside with an internal 430watt power supply.

* 1x Western Digital 320GB 7200rpm SATAII KS 16meg Cache.

* 1x Western Digital 320GB 7200rpm SATAII KS 8meg Cache.

* 2GB RAM

* Video Card: NVIDIA 7950-GT

* Running WinXP with SP2 and all the latest hot fixes.

I'd really like to know why this is happening (so if I need to go to the computer shop due to any broken hardware I can speak with some authority) and, if possible, a solution that can stop this from happening ever again. Any and all help is, of course, greatly appreciated.

Moving C

zardoz — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 17:06:00 -0800

I want to move my C: drive to a different location. On my XP machine I have 5 hard drives, all 20 Gigs with the exception of my C: drive which is 15 Gigs, hence the move. What's the most painless way to do this? I'll pick one drive (say, the D: drive) and clear everything out. Then what? Do I need to physically switch the cables under the hood? I'm not terribly savvy when it comes to hardware, but I seem to recall some "master" and "slave" tags on those cords...but if I can avoid this that'd be best. So I need to get into BIOS? Change the boot order? Or can I take care of this all with the XP setup when I format the D: drive and install Windows?

MacFilter: What procedures would allow a User directory to exist on an external hard drive?

Colloquial Collision — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:49:17 -0800

MacFilter: What procedures would allow a User directory to exist on an external hard drive? I have a Mac mini with a 100GB hard drive. I currently have a set up such as:

(0) Start Up Disk (100GB)
(1) Not the Start Up Disk (320GB)

I have over 120GB of personal files, which I would like to eventually organize into my User directory. These are music files, email correspondence, work, resumes, pdfs, essentially the last six years of my life (almost). The problem is, obviously, there are more files than there is hard drive.

What procedures would allow me to move or create a User directory on the external hard drive? Or, if I did move the current User, would this break iTunes libraries, preferences, font libraries, application preferences, et cetera; could that be avoided? Would a simple alias (link, whatever you call 'em) work, or would this require Unix tweaks?

Thanks for your help Mefites!

Help me recover my data!

Effigy2000 — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:50:54 -0800

My hard drive died and I want to recover a great deal of the data that (hopefully) still exists on it. After reading the Metafilter Wiki, I know this question has been asked before, but my question relates more to the process of recovering the data than the actual possibility of doing so. One day, while booting my computer, my hard drive up and died telling me that the boot sector had failed. This was annoying given I had a great deal of unbacked up data on it. I installed a new hard drive and went on my way, assuming my precious data was gone forever and I'd just have to rebuild.

But after reading the Metafilter Wiki, I learned that not only was it possible to recover data from dead hard drives, but that programs existed which allowed one to do it theselves. So now I intend to go about rescuing that data and hopefully restoring my sanity. I think I know what I need to do but was hoping to get confirmation from the hive mind. Correct me if I'm wrong.

First of all, my new drive is a SATA RAID drive. My old drive is an old standard IDE drive. I plan to install the dead drive into my machine as the primary slave. All good so far, or will the two drive types create some kind of conflict?

After that's done, I assume I simply install one of these programs from within Windows XP which will then somehow allow me to move the data I want to the new drive. Is this correct?

Finally, before I set about this process, is there anything else seasoned vetrans of this kind of thing could tell me, or is there anything else I need to know, to make sure everything goes nice and smoothly?

Thanks in advance!

Help me to get WinXP to recognise my new SATA RAID drive.

Effigy2000 — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 23:28:52 -0800

Which of the files in this 4mb zip file (link to website) can I get rid of so that I can fit it all on one 3.5" floppy disk so that the Windows XP installation program will recognise my brand new SATA drive? So I bought a brand new SATA RAID drive and had a professional install it for me but when I got it home, my copy of WindowsXP Professional (which does not have SP1 or SP2 slipstreamed into it) won't recognise my drive. The setup program tells me that there are no hard drives to install WinXP on and so the setup aborts.

I am assuming that to get WinXP's setup program to recognise my drive, I need to install a 3rd Party RAID driver, something the setup program asks you about when it first starts up and I am assuming that the zip file I linked to is the file I need. But it's 4mb and so there's no way I could fit it all on a floppy disk. So tell me; which files inside the zip could I get rid of to ensure that it'll not only fit on a floppy disk but will also contain the necessary files to allow WinXP to recognise my new drive?

Thanks in advance!

I need a Terabyte!

unSane — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:04:14 -0800

What's the best way of adding a Terabyte of reliable, contiguous, archive-quality storage to my system? By 'best' I mean Toyota Corolla as opposed to Hummer. OK, here's the deal. I have about five or six hard drives dangling off my Mac, about 600 Gb or so. At some point in the next year I'll be upgrading to an Intel Mac and I really want to get rid of my ad hoc storage system.

I intend to do what I do at the moment, which is to have a pair of internal system drives which are mirrored every night, so if one physically fails I simply boot from the other and keep working. (I also have two different incremental offsite backups in case of disk corruption).

What I want in addition to this is about (at least) a terabyte of reasonably fast storage. (It doesn't have to be record-breaking). This is mostly used for very large image files (250Mb -- > 1 Gb). Ideally it would be

1. Hardware fault tolerant, so if one disk in the array fails I don't lose any data
2. Use as much commodity hardware as possible
3. Be as scalable as possible by adding commodity hardware
4. Self-monitor for corruption etc
5. Reasonably quiet, although I can relocate it if it needs to be loud

I am quite happy to build something myself as you would build a PC.

What I don't want is what I have at the moment ... a bunch of drives in mismatched firewire casings of odd sizes with no very good filing system filled with random stuff most of which I'm afraid to delete in case I don't have a back up, and which will take out large quantities of important data if it fails.

I have *way* too much data to consider online storage a al Amazon or Gdrive.

A tape backup is a possibility if it's more cost effective than other solutions.

I would imagine I'm talking some kind of RAID array here, but what kind? And what hardware should I be looking at?

Dear hard drive, please come back to me.

bradn — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 07:09:50 -0800

Is my hard drive really dead? Really? For real? Seriously? My hard drive became inactive/unresponsive/dead last night, and I am wondering if there is something I can do to try to save it. Why I question this is that I was futzing with my system at the time of said death, and something smells fishy (figuratively.)

I had been upgrading firmwares and messing with settings and noticed that both of my optical drives had dissappeared from My Computer. During a reboot while I was troubleshooting this, I got a RAID error saying that one of my drives was not responding. I have 2 WD Caviar 80GB in RAID 0 (or whichever is striping). After switching out cables, and trying several different things, it became apparent that the drive was not working at all.

I put it in an external enclosure and it doesn't even powerup or initialize. I reinstalled windows on the working drive and tried the non-working drive as a slave. The system wouldn't boot or recognize either HD. (on the plus, the optical drives are now working fine.)

This drive is less than 4 years old, which is less than the typical HD life expectancy, so I am not ready to let it go so easily. Is there anything I can do to try to save it? I don't need (and can't even use) the data anymore, so that is not an issue. I tried rapping it on the housing a couple times to see if it was stuck, but no dice.
Thanks in advance!

mp3 music management

Frasermoo — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 06:20:34 -0800

How flexible is my new mp3 library? I've bought a Sony 20Gb NW-HD5 and transferred all my CD's via PC onto it. This has created a 'Library' on my pc. Now I want to buy my wife an mp3 player.
Will it be easy enough to utilise that library or is it exclusive to the mp3 player I have or only Sony mp3 players?

Also, we are moving abroad soon, so I want to download the library to a portable hard-disk to transport. Is this a good idea, or can I just re-install SonicStage at my destination and d/load all the tracks from the player?

Windows data backup options

agropyron — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 08:06:14 -0800

What's your favorite Windows XP data backup option? Right now I've got a second hard drive, and every now and then I will drag my important files over to it to back them up. It would be really snazzy if, when the disk fails, I could just pop in the backup and reboot.

However! I'm fairly leery of giving that level of trust to anyone's program. I would probably have nightmares about the backup disk not working correctly, and losing all my data. RAID 1 seems somehow more likely to fail than an automated program that just copies your important files to a secondary drive. (The only way that seems likely to fail is if both disks actually died at once.)

So what utilities do you all place your trust in? Note: I'm speaking as a home user, not a workplace situation.

Where to buy PC case mod supplies?

scarabic — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 16:35:34 -0800

Let's say you had a wooden box you wanted to turn into a PC case. Where would you buy a metal 5.25" bay assembly? I'm talking about a U-shaped piece of flat metal that will screw onto the wood box wherein a couple of drives can be mounted. There's just way too much noise in Google on this one. Thanks!

Advantages to partitioning Windows XP?

tranquileye — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 12:45:32 -0800

Are there any real advantages to running Windows XP on a partitioned hard drive, with a different partition each for Windows, programs, and files?