Hey guys, So I have two hard drives, one that was in my laptop and one that i am going to put in. I have a ceasing that allows me to put in two drives at once (and after a long process of getting the new drives to recognized), I have both in the device hooked up to my desktop. So I have three main questions: Firstly, is there a way to simply copy over the files, since my computer sees them both as different externals. Secondly, I have a duel boot on the other drive with windows 7 and ubuntu, will they both load up correctly? or will it be missing files, sadly Im missing the original disks and up grade keys for the vista install, and all I have is the ubuntu disk. Lastly, the reason I am changing the hard drive is partly for speed (from a 5400 to a 7200), but also becuase several tests have told me that I had about 17,000 bad sectors on the drive. are the files going to be corrupt or missing? thanks for your help, you guys are always really helpful Sincerely, Vetre
One thing about cloning laptop drives is the "chs geometry", some laptops require that the new drive be inside the laptop when you do the clone (refer to as a reverse clone). If you do a "sector by sector" clone, this will copy everything including the bad sectors. This might work where a regular clone might stop the clone if it has problems reading the drive. As long as you do a full drive clone, this will copy vista/linux and the MBR which has the necessary information so that the dual-boot will continue to work. You can also just backup the "vista" OS, called an image backup, you will need to make repairs to get it to bootup. For that you will need the repair section of the vista installation dvd (vista recovery repair dvd) the neosmart website has it. I backup and restored hard drives all the time, and have always got the new drive to bootup. But many times I've needed to do minor repairs to get the drive to bootup. If the hard drive was booting up even with the bad sectors, you might be able to get it to work when you do the clone. I never met a drive I couldn't backup and restore to a new drive.
