Need help badly! Hard drive may be about to fail

[JuffoWup]

Hi,

Recently there've been problems detecting my hard drive on startup; today it took around 5 reboots to start up properly. I suspect hard drive troubles, and am worried that failure is imminent, so I'm wondering whether there's any way to check for sure if my hard drive is going to fail.

Also, while I can still start up my computer, I was wondering how I could transfer the contents of my hard drive, operating system and all, to a new disk. That way I can replace my current disk and proceed like nothing had happened. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Macro2]

Most around here will recommend Norton Ghost. In the meantime I'd burn all my critical files to a CD or DVD.

 

[AristoV300]

Yeah I would transfer all of your files on to some media. Then if you hook up both drives to the mobo you can clone your OS partition to the new drive. If not then backup your OS partition to media and then load it on the new drive. You will need to partition the new drive first.