Hard Disk Nightmare

My harddisk resides in PC near to its end. It can be powered up sometimes, but in some occasion the harddisk stop running after idle it for a while. The problem existed a monthe ago. May be this is caused by running e2k and BT heavily. Some of my friends said those p2p applications overload the disk too much.

Last week the problem occured more frequent. Before it totally die I decided to replace it with a new harddisk. So I bought Western Digital 40GB 7200rpm, 2MB cache, it is cheapest among the same and have proven good record. However, it is the beginning of my nightmare. I plugged in the new disk and power up the PC, a noise of very high frequency was heard. I guess it was the noise from the motor driving the disk, not the disk head. Next day, I went to the shop that I bought the disk for replacement, but the salesman pointed me to the distributor. Fine, the day after I went to the distributor (it is quite near to my home), and they were very helpful to replace a new one for me. I went home and carried out partition reallocation work.

My harddisk has 3 partitions, 1 for WinME, 1 for W2K and the rest for storing project data, music files, downloads, CD/DVD image - all important stuff. I used Partition Magic (PMagic) to copy those partition -- but I was wrong. The first two partitions are copied successfully but not the last one, those storing important data files. PMagic reported cluster error something like that. As the first two partitions were already copied into a new disk, I tried to boot from it. Both WinME and Win2000 can boot up, and I found the NT boot loader is there. In Win2000, I can also see login prompt, but it hangs immediately after login. WinME was not good at all, it also hanged at some stage during start up. I finally realized that PMagic changed file path in your new disk. For example, my original Win2000 partition is D:, the new Win2000 partition after copy is G:. PMagic automatically changed the system path to G: for all of the related system files. But after I booted solely with the new disk, it becomes D:. As some paths was change to G: and there is no G: anymore, Win2000 on the new disk hanged. Hey, I don't know it is a nice feature or not, but it must be a bad one in my case. I used a wrong tools, I should have used Ghost or Drive Image instead.

Nevermind, I left these two partitions alone and worked for copying data partition to the new disk. It was easy. I simply created a new partition in the new disk and copied all the files from the original drive using Explorer. Easy, right? After a few days, I get a copy of Ghost and gave it a try. Unfortunately, at that time the harddisk became very unstable and it never get done successfully. It stopped and hanged at some stage in Ghost while copying. Until today, it is still no progress. I am better off now, even I cannot run Ghost, I now have my data files on the new disk, and they were safe. I am now thinking of installing new Win2000 on the new disk instead.