Main Hard Drive Replacement, Vista

I have an ailing HDD on my Dell Laptop which is running Windows Vista. I've ordered a replacement HDD, which will be here soon. I'm looking for the easiest way to move all contents from the old drive to the new drive without having to reinstall everything from scratch.

I've looked at drive cloning software as one possible method. Or, possibly leveraging the windows system restore some how. Uncertain if that's possible.

The old drive kind of sort a works, but probably not for long. I've already copied documents and user files off. But, I think I could clone it if I put it in the freezer for a while. That's worked on other HDD before, anyway.

Looking forward to your input. Thanks.

 

I agree with Pete. Cloning is great to restore a perfectly running system, but not one with issues.

If me, I would do a proper fresh install to the new drive, then attach the old drive as a secondary (NOT boot) drive via an external enclosure or adapter to copy your old data (if the drive is still working).

I would avoid the "freezer" trick. I am aware of it working on just 1 drive in over 25 years working with computers. And even then it was not sure the cold really did anything.

But regardless, the idea behind the freezer trick was for the extreme cold to cause seized motor bearings to constrict in size (as matter does when cooled), and hopefully free up (un-seize) so the motor could spin long enough to access and copy off important files.

The problem is, as soon as the motor begins to spin, friction takes over and the bearings warm up, expand (as matter does when heated) and seize again.

So the fact of the matter is, if the freeze trick works, you will only have enough time to copy off a couple Gb of data before failure again.

BTW, have you run chkdsk /r on the drive?

 

You've convinced me. I'll install Windows 7 on the new HDD. I'm going to upgrade the CPU while I'm at it.

I backed up the files when my wife first started noticing issues, so I'd only need to access the old drive if I've missed something.

Thanks for the advice guys.