So my laptop started locking up and making a weird clicking noise. When I reboot everything is fine. So I am thinking hard drive... Did a check disk, defrag and all of that, no issues. Cruised online forums, which said even though the disk itself may be fine it could the electronics that are attached to it that could be going south. So I always wanted to upgrade the harddrive to something bigger. Found a compatible 1 TB drive (Western Digital bare drive) and purchased it. Found an easy peasy usb harddrive enclosure (Inateck) and purchased it. Found some cloning software (Acronis) and purchased that. When I got the harddrive and the enclosure, I put to two together and plugged it into my laptop. The enclosure has no screws, you just slide the cover off, drop the drive in, sliding it into the connector and slide the cover back on. I connected the enclosure using the USB cable that came with it. The enclosure has a power on and off button, obviously I turned that on. The harddrive was not formatted so it would not show up as a harddrive on my computer but it did show up as an ejectible mass storage device in the system icon tray (lower right hand corner of your desktop), I checked its properties and found it was performing normally. Next I made an image of my harddrive using the Norton 360 suite I have on a different external harddrive I have been using for backups; an image is NOT the same thing as a clone, its a compressed format back up and it may or may not get all the operating system bits you need. In the case of an image you have to restore data from the disk where the image is stored to the disk you want it to run on. I made an image as an insurance policy because the next step can go horribly wrong if you are not careful. It took a couple of hours. The next step is to create a clone. A clone, if everything goes right, a drive that is the duplicate of what you had, in theory you should be able to just swap it out for the old hard drive and it will work just like the old one. I chose Acronis over the freebee Clonezilla because it is just a lot more user friendly. Sure I understand Linux, that does not mean I want to spend the time coding 20 or 30 steps to tell the cloning software what to do. Just thought I would mention Clonezilla if you are cheap, technically competent, and enjoy a modest challenge. Acronis auto played from my DVD burner. Once it was loaded and registered, I simply accessed it, and found the cloning tool; it also does backups and things like that, but I am not using it for that, I am only using it to make a clone of my existing harddrive. Use the *cloning* tool, not the back up tool, its under the Tools & Utilities Tab. Acronis was very intuitive, select the drive you want to clone, the drive you want to clone to, which does not need to be formatted, and click next, OK and restart at the appropriate places and away it goes. Just be very careful to make sure you pick the right drive to clone from (the source drive) and the right drive to clone to (the destination drive), you mix this stuff up and you can easily wipe out all of your data. You may have to wait a bit for the software to do its thing between steps, I didnt wait to reboot my computer *using the software* the first time and so the computer did not boot into the acronis cloning environment. Not to worry, I just started it up again and the next time patiently waited for acronis to reboot the computer. When acronis rebooted the computer started up in the acronis environment and started cloning my hard drive. Make sure the shut down when finished button is checked off, that way you can disconnect and turn off the clone; you dont want your machine to get confused about what Operating system to use; a successful clone will duplicate everything and create a disk that you can run your computer from. This process also took several hours. How long it takes depends on your computers processor and memory and the version of USB you are using to transfer the data. It finished sometime after dinner. I turned my computer back on just to verify the old hard drive still worked and then turned it back off. You dont want to use the old harddrive at all after cloning, because any changes you make wont be reflected on the clone. Moment of truth time today. I disconnected everything from my laptop and pulled the battery before removing the cover. I found a website, insidemylaptop, that had pictures to tell me how to get the back cover off my laptop. It only took 5 screws; I could have easily removed 10 more that were not necessary so it was a good idea to see what to do the trick. 4 screws to remove the harddrive caddy from the laptop, 4 more to pop the old hard drive out of the caddy, then I pulled the clone out of the enclosured, screwed it into the caddy, the caddy back into the laptop, put the back cover back on, put the battery back in, hooked up the perpherals and fired it up. Windows said it needed to reboot, presumably the operating system noticing I changed the harddrive and reverifying my Windows 7 license. Everything seems to be working. Hopefully that shut down and clicking was caused by my harddrive. Still nice to know I can still use my technician skills.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Apr 2014 19:50:48 +0000
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