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Win 7 Home 64Bit - HD (C) dying. Questions on reloading windows

J

JETninja

Senior member
Ok, looking for some guidance, not done some of this before. And I'm getting older and time is of the essence. (we leave for a week long cruise Sunday)

2 days ago I got a Pop-up, "SMART" has detected a problem with the "C" HD and do I want to start Back up? I rebooted, scanned the HD overnight, still getting the message. So I need to migrate off that disc.

When I built this system (in the siggy below) I initally ran it in RAID 0 (IIRC) but after a month or 2 and several small issues, I gave up on RAID. The "C" HD is one of the 1TB Seagate's, the other is still in there and unused. There have been some long term issues with some data from back in the raid days, Microsoft.NET has not been able to update is one of those. So I have been wanting to do a re-install, but next month would have been better! 😀

So last night I let it create a system Image of the C drive and saved it on the 2TB Data drive (took all last night and part of today to make it!) and then I created a Rescue Disk.

I have never used either before. (very lucky, over the years I've had excellent HD reliability.)

Ultimately, I would like to have a relatively clean install of Win 7 on the good 1TB drive.

Should I use my Win 7 disc and load a clean version onto the good 1TB HD and then have it pick up the system image? (Can it?)

Or should I start from the repair disc, and then load the system image?

I don't want to reload the old issues obviously. I don't know exactly what all the Image contains....


Any and all help is much appreciated!!!

Thank you very much!
 
Do a fresh install from a Windows 7 DVD on the 2nd (good) drive connected to the first sata port. You can reconnect the 1st (bad) drive after windows installs and still be able to copy any important data over. Run Belarc to get any serials/keys that you may need for the reinstall. Don't try and use an image that may have corrupt data. If you need an install disc you can download them here and use your key.
http://www.mydigitallife.info/downl...cial-32-bit-and-64-bit-direct-download-links/
 
Afraid you were going to say that. Much better in the long run, just very time consuming. Thanks! PS, interesting tool that Belarc....
 
If you want to be able to run backups quickly and restore a backup quickly, then it is best to have a small OS drive and a large media drive. You back the OS image onto the media drive, then you clone the entire media drive onto an external. Then if your OS drive goes down you can have another one up and running in an hour. I keep a few 80GB hard drives around just incase my 64gb ssds die for some reason.

An even better solution is a small OS drive and a NAS for media files. If it handles its own backups that's even better still.
 
Great Idea! I'll have to look into that sometime.

New issue though, though its minor. The 2nd good Seagate 1TB that I loaded the OS on, I chose custom and even told it to format it, but after getting it all installed and setup, when after the Bios and before it loads Windows its seeing 2 Win 7 installs....yet I see no record of a 2nd one. Not sure what the deal is. Going on vacation tomorrow, so I'll have to debug it next week...
 
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