Amer
pew pew pew
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The writing has been on the wall for the last few months now that my main hard drive in my laptop is failing. It's a 500gb drive with two partitions - C: with 116gb partition with Win7 and a few other utility programs on it and D: which is a 329gb partition that unfortunately contains my Steam library and a few big apps like Photoshop and Lightroom. (Yeah I wasn't really thinking about that one).
It started with getting through the windows 7 loading screen and then just staying at a black blank screen with a mouse forever. This was back in early October. I thought it might just be a windows problem so I used the recovery disc that came with the laptop to basically wipe the drive and reinstall win7. I have an external backup that contains all my documents, etc. on C: and then is a total backup of the D: drive which I used to put everything back in it's place at that time.
A few times since then I've received the black screen since then. If I wait long enough (20-30 min) it eventually seems to get over itself and goes to win7 desktop. This leads me to believe it's the HD failing as the problem keeps occuring. I also once got a blue screen about an unmountable boot volume...lol.
Yesterday I got the black screen again after rebooting after things were running terribly slow. I hadn't noticed any performance issues until now. I decided to have it run chkdsk on C: on next startup and it found one bad file on stage 4 and promptly froze. I eventually just hard rebooted it after waiting over an hour (probably not the best idea i know) and now performance is worse than ever. Applications have a noticeable delay when opening and often freeze for a few seconds randomly when they are open.
I've got a 2nd 500gb drive in the laptop that is mostly unused. The one partition on it contains a backup of the windows repair disc that I have. It's partitioned into two equal parts, about 232gb each.
So I figure I need a new HD. I've never replaced a HD where I've actually cared about the data before, it's just always been a clean install. I'e kept my backup up to date, but at this point I'd like some advice. Should I just start fresh and try to put things back again with the backup? Or should I try to clone the drive and put it on the new drive? I've never done that before, and I'm not sure if it would even work now given the state of the drive? Should I even entertain trying to move the data to the 2nd HD and running it from there?
Well, after giving chkdsk another go last night, everything completed successfully and performance is once again improved. No problems on startup at all in the last day, even with multiple reboots to fix things.
I guess we will see what happens.
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