Failing hard drive, clone?

[bonapart]

I upgraded my UTV in Dec '01 and it has been totally solid since then... 2+ years of being on 24/7 and never a problem.

In the past week the hard drive (WD 120gb) has started making a loud whining noise intermittently. The UTV will lock up and reboot itself, but that won't be enough... I have to remove power to get the drive to stop whining, then it will boot again ok.

So, it seems the hard disk is on death's door. I want to save my recordings. In searching the threads here, it seems if I get a new drive with the same geometry, I can clone it from the old drive using winhex, and the newly cloned drive will work straight away after being installed into the UTV. Is this correct? Has anyone here done this?

bonapart

[RandC]

I can clone it from the old drive using winhex, and the newly cloned drive will work straight away after being installed into the UTV. Is this correct? Has anyone here done this?

bonapart
Yes bonapart, I have used winhex to clone one drive to another. You will have to do the hot swap method to get you PC to recognize the UTV drive. Then just clone disk to disk, be prepared to be without UTV for a while. It took me 5 hours to clone a 120GB on a 700MHZ PC, don't know if PC speed has anything to do with time to clone. Providing the UTV drive data is not damaged you should be good to go. I just sent back a WD120GB that had a high pitched whine and could not get any data from it. For me the high-pitched whine seems to have been the death of my drive.

Good Luck.