Backup

[NeWbiE :-)]

Alright i bought a new hard drive, and im looking to not really back up but replace my old one. what id like to do is find a way to put the new hdd in as secondary, and copy the master hdd to the secondary, for somereason this seems more complicated. i have nero which has a program called BACKIT UP...dont know if that can help me. Any easier suggestions please let me know.

Also the reason for replacing the hdd is it frequently skips dont know why but it does. My first problem with this is that it laggs what ever game im playing and stops it for about 2 seconds but even more importantly it sometimes goes as bad as restarting the pc. If after my switch i put the bad hdd as secondary will this skip still effect me?

[saphalline]

Sylvander is the expert on this stuff, so wait for him. To point you in the right direction, though, imaging a drive is rarely done within Windows. Or at least, it's not advisable. ;) What you'll need to do is work with EBCD and boot off of that - it has tons of free utilities that can do this sort of thing easily. Check out this thread (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=42617) for starters.

As far as your current hard drive goes, it sounds like it's either failing or you need to disconnect & reconnect the cables (both data and power). If it's failing, I wouldn't recommend keeping it around. No telling what adverse affect it might have on your new hard drive.

[Paleo Pete]

Check the drive manufacturer's website for their installation software. That should be able to partition and format the drive as well as transfer all data on the original drive to the new one as well. IBM/Hitachi installation software does not have this option that I can find, one big disappointment last time I had to replace a drive and it turned out to be an IBM.

Set the drives up a bit differently than you originally described, I set the new drive to Master and the old one as Slave and it works perfect every time. If you can't find the drive manufacturer's software, the Emergency Boot CD mentioned above or maybe some of the other utilities linked may do the trick. Once data is transferred, remove the old drive and keep going.

One note- in many cases new drives will cooperate better if both are set to Cable Select, usually I try it that way first.