Laptop HD failure

[multiweb]

Well last night I got a surprise when my trusted Toshiba packed it and shut down without any warning. :sadeyes: Went to the computer shop this morning and dug out two 160GB IDE drives. My satellite is 5-6yrs old. Does the job but spare parts are getting scarce. Luckily I had a fairly recent image of the drive. One of the problem though is that my C: drive partition (20GB in total) was getting too small for the job. I found this program called Acronis Disk Director on their site (I'm an Acronis fanboy ;) ) that can resize/edit/merge partitions without the need to reformat so you keep all the data. Terrific stuff. So I now have 3x40GB from an original drive that had 4x20GB and it's all working.

I thought my experience would be of interest to people who are running out of room on their boot drive. :thumbsup:

[Barrykgerdes]

Yes Acronis is quite good but I have two other free programs that will do the same thing. I often resize my disks to free up space where I want it.

When you make an image of a drive it is useful to reduce the size to as little as possible. This will make it easier to re-install because the images don't like drives that are smaller than the image even if you know the contents will fit on the new drive.

I can even get around the problem of installing XP or 2000 when Windows Vista or Windows 7 is already installed and make them multiboot.

Another useful trick is to use a relatively small drive for your main operation system and then keep your valuable data and other installed programs on a secondary drive.

Barry

[Octane]

I'm going through this headache at the moment, Marc.

GPartEd and ntfsclone have saved my rear end; made a direct image of the drive and will attempt to try and salvage what I can over the weekend.

H

[multiweb]

In the laptop last night it wouldn't spin at all. If you got a USB enclosure connect it to a cable and stick the drive in the freezer. I got another 20min or so out of mine before it completely died.