Help with cloning new hard drive

[psloan]

Group,


So I picked up a new samsung hd from newegg. A SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive. I tried to install this last night. Hitting a problem. I don't have much experience with changing drives. Not sure if I have a bad drive....

How often does getting a bad drive out of the box happen?

I am trying to clone the new samsung to replace the maxtor as my systems primary c drive.

What is happening to me is:

My system is a Dell 8400 with a maxtor 500g as the primary drive, and a 160 segate as a secondary, both are sata. I am trying to replace the maxtor with the quieter, cooler Samsung. I cracked the case, plugged in the samsung and booted. All worked so far. Then I used maxblast to clone the maxtor primary drive to the new samsung. I left the samsung as a secondary drive and ran some tests. all seemed well. Then I switched the samsung to be the primary c drive and the maxtor as a secondary drive. I then tried to run some speed tests and hit several bsod (blue screen of death) crashes. I tried forcing the samsung to be 150 sata connection, but that did not seem to work. I ran a chckdsk on the samnung and it showed multiple issues. So I started from scratch again. Re cloning the maxtor to the samsung. Same result the clone would work well until i switched it to be the primary.... So it was getting late and switched the samasung back to a secondary drive, removed the 160g segate and just did a plain old format on the samsung last night. It was still running when I went to bed. This morning, it was finished with no errors. So I started a utility to check for errors (hd tune I think i was called) Will check into it after work today. Anyway, i need to return the maxtor by tommorow. Fry's 15 day return policy (yuck) but I am not sure I have a bad drive, or something else is a problem. Have I missed anything? One thought was maybe i was over taxing the powersupply with the 3 sata's connected?

Any pointers?

Thanks.

--pat

 

[Paperdoc]

Some systems object to having two drives connected that both claim to be boot drives. Have you tried running with the new Samung (after cloning) as the boot drive and disconnect the old Maxtor so the system can't try to use it?

 

[corkyg]

Cloning is really quite simple if you use Acronis TrueImage 10 and the bootable CD that the program makes for you. You can connect the drives anyway you want as long as they are visible. Boot the system with the bottable CD. You select the SOURCE (Maxtor) drive and the TARGET (Samsung) drive and the process duplicates your old drive to the new drive and is immediately bootable.

 

[psloan]

Thanks for the hint Paperdoc. I think I may have tried that last night, but I tried a lot of stuff, so I can't be sure. I will give that a try when I get home tonight.

corkyg, cloning went fine as far as I can tell. I will check out your suggestion though. Thanks.

 

[psloan]

yes windows was messed up when i had both drives in. I eventually chose to reinstall windows anyway. the old install was very old and had a couple quirks i could not find a way to get rid of. friys took the maxtor back. now happily running cooler and quieter sumsung. Thanks for the advice.