John Hesch

I bought the new hard drive today. In case you’re not up to speed on the Hard Drive Blues, you can catch up here and here, but it’s not necessary. I found a 160 Gig Maxtor hard drive at Staples for $109.99. Best Buy had it for the same price which was the best price in town. I could of possibly found it cheaper online but I wanted to get it up and going today.

If you’ve ever had a hard drive crash, it is possible to transfer the data off the old drive and onto the new drive even if the operating system on the old drive will not boot. I have done this several times so unfortunately I have some experience at crying the hard drive blues.

1. You should back up your critical data on a regular basis in anticipation of a crash. I only back up my most important data that would be difficult or impossible to replace. But if you have the storage, why not back up the entire drive?
2. Pull out the old drive and install the new drive as the master. Look at your drive’s instruction manual to determine the jumper settings for master and slave. Now hook up your old drive as the slave. So you should have both drives installed in your PC with the new drive as the master and the fried drive as the slave.
3. Insert your OS installation CD and start up your PC. If you are not directed to the Windows setup screen then you may have to boot into your BIOS and change the boot priority to CD ROM first.
4. Install your operating system and needed drivers.

Now when you boot up and open My Computer you should see your new drive and the damaged drive listed. If your drive is not damaged too much you will be able to drag and drop needed files to the new drive as I’m doing right now. If the old drive is badly damaged then you will need to install GetDataBack software to recover the data. I’ve had to do this before too and it takes a long time to transfer files but works like a charm. Thankfully I get to skip this step, for now.

Ahhh…it’s so nice to have a freshly installed drive.