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[benn600]

My boot drive has been showing signs of failure.  If it does fail (hasn't yet) it will be the first failed drive ever for me.  There is no data I would mind losing on it but it would be about 10 hours to restore my system how I like it.

The problem is that I have a rather complicated setup.  I have 4 drives.  2 are on RAID 0 and I think they are fine so they can be excluded from this issue.  The second 2 are separate.  One has Windows on it and the second has Suse Linux on it.  The problem is that I think the Suse drive has the boot loader.  It shows me a screen asking which OS I want to boot into each time I turn my computer on.  I would like to throw out Suse for the moment and move my Windows information to the other drive but it may overwrite the boot loader and I'll be out of luck.  Is there a Linux live CD that would help me with this situation?

Ideally, I could just move everything to the "good" drive and then remove the bad one--possibly replacing it with another drive I have laying around.

The drive's problems:
Every occasion, the problem shows up.  It seems to happen after the computer has been on for 10 hours or more.  Suddenly, the drive seems to start making a clicking sound as if it is trying to read data over and over.  The computer slows to a crawl and basically doesn't work at all.  I can fix the problem by shutting it off (usually by just holding button instead of waiting forever for it to "possibly" read the drive) and then turning it on.  Everything works fine then.  Once it starts having trouble, it doesn't usually stop until I shut it off and turn it back on.  I have ran a complete scandisk on it but it didn't report anything important.

[MerlinWerks]

I would try to get a copy of Norton Ghost 2003 or something similar and save an image to one of your non-raid drives, install your spare drive and restore your saved image to it. If you are running a legal copy of XP, you may need to re-activate with the hard drive change. If its been more than 120 days since you installed Windows it's no big deal as you can activate online pretty painlessly. Less than 120 days will probably require a phone call to MS.

More info here: http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.htm

I just went through the same thing 2 weeks ago, I changed the volume Id on the new drive to match the old and did not have to re-activate.

Good Luck!

[Alex B]

Usually a single HW change does not make the activation reset. I have changed an XP boot & OS drive without needing to reactivate Windows.

I would use two spare drives (buy if needed) and clone both OS drives before trying anything else. After that I could safely experiment with removing the Boot Loader.

IMHO, Acronis True Image is better than Norton Ghost for cloning boot & OS HDs. I have always needed to do an undocumented registry tweaking process for making a "Ghosted" drive to work.

[MerlinWerks]

Hi Alex

Usually a single HW change does not make the activation reset. I have changed an XP boot & OS drive without needing to reactivate Windows.

True, but he may have made other hardware changes which is why I provided the link to the WPA explanation 

IMHO, Acronis True Image is better than Norton Ghost for cloning boot & OS HDs. I have always needed to do an undocumented registry tweaking process for making a "Ghosted" drive to work.

Yes, True Image is well regarded by many people. I experimented with it briefly but still use Ghost 2K3 (DOS mode only) since it's worked flawlessly for me over the past several years and have found no compelling reason to change, as always YMMV 

[Alex B]

Ghost may work better with image files, but for me, in the GUI mode the "copy disk" system has always resulted a drive that cannot be used without tweaking. The OS boots, but hangs soon after that because Windows tries to find itself from a different internally named drive. The tweak is to start the PC with another bootable drive & Windows installation and edit a certain part of the registry of the cloned Windows with regedit32 (it can load remote registry branches) and clear the disk IDs.

[benn600]

Those are good suggestions.  The easiest solution I think would be to take out the Linux drive, put in a new drive, use a Maxtor/WD boot CD, and then copy the HDD from the bad drive to the newer one--then swap the bad for new and replace the linux drive.  That didn't even occur to me.

Does anyone have any ideas about what the problem is with the drive?  It seems to be working quite well for the most part at the moment.  I've been having these similar problems about once a week for the past 2 months or so.

[hit_ny]

2 are on RAID 0

You do realise if for any reason one of them fails then you automatically lose what's on the two. The only advantage with RAID 0 is faster access time.

I've been using norton ghost for years and have never had an issue with it. I can't imagine how i got by in the past,  i did not.

[dlone]

Does anyone have any ideas about what the problem is with the drive?  It seems to be working quite well for the most part at the moment.  I've been having these similar problems about once a week for the past 2 months or so.

What make/model/size is it?
Please don't say Maxtor 300Gb  I'm so sick of RMA'ing them

Usually it's the electronics that fail - I've gotten around a few dead drives by replacing the mainboard from an identicle drive (but unless you're familiar with doing it and don't mind having 2 dead drives instead of one if anything goes wrong, I'd stay away from trying it)

The 'clonk-clonk' noises are normally when the drive fails to read a sector too many times and recalibrated itself - there can be a few other reasons but that's the most common cause that I've seen (checking the SMART results with a util like hdtune www.hdtune.com you can see the error counts go up - well, they go down for some and up for others, but you get the point)

[NickM]

Alex, I've had the diskID issue before, after using Ghost disk copy.  To you have a link on the registry edits required to remove or reset the diskID?

[hit_ny]

You could also try this nice, free tool. It may do as you wish.

http://home.tiscali.de/zdata/hdcopy_e.htm

Site says it can do  Platforms: Windows 95, 98 and Me

Is that only the above or W2K & XP too ?

(the screen shot shows an XP like dialog..so im thinking..maybe)