I belive my hard drive is starting to go south on me. A couple times the past week I have heard strange clunking noises comeing from my computer that sounds like the hard drive, so I shut down, restart, and the noise goes away. I have a new Western Digital hard drive ready to install but I have a question before I do this, After I replace the HD, do I just put my copy of Win XP CD in the CD drive when I start up the computer and go from there, or do I need to do other stuff to load Win XP on new HD?? I'm not looking foward to this since I have to reload so many programs back on. Appreciate ant words of wisdom from you folks. BTW, my computer is about 5 years old that a friend of mine helped me put together after buying the parts from several places. It's been rock solid until now.

 

If you bought a retail version hard drive, it should come with software that would allow you to copy your old hard drive to it so you do not have to reload all your old programs. This assumes that the old hard drive is still readable. If you bought an OEM version (no software), there is software out there that will allow you to do the same thing. Then you would just put the new hard drive in place of the old.

 

I just did the same with my laptop. They offer an ide interface you plug into a USB port, then boot from an included CD and it will copy your original drive byte for byte. If you're having problems you can't correct on your current drive, (scandisk won't run correct, ect) you'll just copy the bad parts to your new disk. One of the advantages of complete re-install is it tends to get rid of stuff you don't use as well as it can make your computer significantly faster.

 

Yeah, if you buy a retail version of a new hard drive (comes in a pretty box with cables and stuff) then there should be a disk/CD in there with utilities to copy everything over from the old drive to the new one. I've used the maxtor and Seagate utilities to work with drives. They both work really well. If you're sensing your drive is going south, back up the important stuff now, then get a new hard drive ASAP. Once you have everything on the new drive you can use the old one for backups and non important stuff.