Hey guys,

 

So this morning, I powered up my rig for a flight, but I got an alert that Ive never seen before: SMART status bad, repair and replace. A little internet research found that this was a hard drive fail, or close to fail. I dont know what my options are, or how itll affect my sim, what should I do?

 

Thanks for any help,

 

Jackson Dalton.

Best thing to do in this case, in my opinion, is to image copy the failing drive to another drive and then replace it.  You can then image back to the new drive.

 

Also, make sure if this is your boot drive that you have a set of bootable disks that you can use to get the system back up initially. If you don't have any made you might want to do so right away.

 

 

Good luck.

The problem with an image, is that if the failing HD has corrupted your data, then you will be copying that corruption on to a new hard drive.

 

If it were me, I'd back up only the essential stuff, thus minimising the chance of copying over the corruption. And reinstall windows from scratch on the new drive.

Hey guys, just checking in

 

I've decided to try to recover my data myself. I've bought everything I need, I just had a quick HDD question

 

The drive I got (http://www.amazon.com/RE4-Enterprise-Hard-Drive-WD1003FBYX/dp/B003SANWI6/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top) is highly reviewed, but many reviews say that it works best as part of a RAID configuration, which I don't have the interest nor the money to invest in. Should this drive work just as well as a stand alone drive?

Hey guys,

 

So this morning, I powered up my rig for a flight, but I got an alert that Ive never seen before: SMART status bad, repair and replace. A little internet research found that this was a hard drive fail, or close to fail. I dont know what my options are, or how itll affect my sim, what should I do?

 

Thanks for any help,

 

Jackson Dalton.

 

Points up the need to do frequent full image backups ---and--- have the backup software VERIFY the image is not CORRUPT.

 

Recommended product:  Acronis True Image 2014.  I believe it's free trial for the first 30 days.  Works on all current and past versions of Windows including Windows 8 that are still supported by Microsoft.

 

Tools available with Acronis include CLONE DISK where your entire disk can be copied to a new blank hard disk.  Does NOT require the new disk to be formatted.  The new drive can be smaller or larger (larger is recommended).

 

Install new hard disk of same or greater size than your current disk inside your system (if possible) or in an external drive housing (example:  Thermaltake USB housing).

 

Install Acronis to your current system.  Start Acronis True Image Home.

 

Click Utilities tab.

 

Click on CLONE DISK

 

Select your old drive as the SOURCE,  select your new drive as the TARGET.

 

REBOOT.

 

The cloning should begin.  While running, choose "shut down after task completed" by putting a checkmark in the tickbox.

 

After shutdown, remove the old (failing drive)  At this point you can unplug it.

 

disconnect the new secondary drive and connect it to the connectors that were going to your old drive.

 

Start PC.  It 'should' boot.

 

Worst case, you may need to change the boot drive in your BIOS SETUP to the new hard drive.

 

After Windows comes back up

 

Double-click MY COMPUTER, find your C: drive, right click and choose properties, then TOOLS, then DISK CHECK.  Put tick marks into BOTH boxes, and reboot.

 

It will take quite some time, but it will check your drive for errors, and attempt to recover or mark out bad sectors which may have come over from the failing drive.

 

This is your best-case scenario if you don't have a good backup image of your drive.

 

I wouldn't wait 1 minute longer... do it now!

Thanks for the tip, Robert, I'll look into that a little more. Just a few questions.

 

My hard drive won't boot, so I don't have a system I can call mine. Can I plug both the old and new drive into another system, then transfer the disk contents over? To me it just seems like I need to install this program to my old drive, which I can't boot up anymore.

That doesn't sound good.  It may already be too late.  At this point, you may need to investigate data recovery services if you have really critical data on the OLD drive.  If your old drive won't boot, it's unlikely that the NEW drive would after 'copying over' the files from the old to the new... if the old drive is corrupt and bad... cloning it would just mean you have TWO drives that are corrupt and bad...  There are DATA RECOVERY SERVICES on the Internet (they're not cheap), which might be the call if mission-critical data is on that old drive.

 

If not, you can just buy a new drive, re-install Windows, and any programs, and 'start over'... a painful lesson in the reality of hard drives.  They will ALL fail, it's only a question of 'when'.  The average hard disk drive will fail between 3 and 5 years of age.

 

People who aren't backing up either don't have important stuff on their system, or are living in blissful ignorance.  If you have a complex flight deck setup... BACKUP and VERIFY the backup.  At least weekly would be a good bet.

The old drive boot sector doesn't necessarily have to be valid to be able to read data from it. This is as long as the MFT hasn't been corrupted. If this is the case you should still be able to access data on it.

 

I would suggest that you purchase (cheap is ok) or borrow from a friend an external USB drive bay, install the old drive in it. Install the new drive in your computer case, install the OS, and make sure it is the boot drive.

 

Install the software to read the external drive if necessary, boot the system, and see if you can access the drive. It should show up in your hardware list and if so, can be treated just like any other drive.

 

If this works, then you can copy over any data you wish to keep to your new drive. Unfortunately, if the drive is not recognized then it's probably gone along with its' data. Hopefully you don't have any critical data on it. If you do, then the data recovery service recommended would probably be the way to go.

 

As far as your choice in the new drive, it will work fine without being in a raid config.

 

Good luck.

Well I couldn't be more confused...

 

I got my universal USB drive adapter today. Just to make it sure it worked, I plugged it and my hard drive into my brothers computer, just to assess the damages. To my surprise everything was there! Okay, then this must be a hard drive specific thing. Then I used SpeedFans SMART test, just to see where the drive was. 100 percent, all across the board. Well that's weird...So I decided to try to boot it up on my brothers computer, and just as I thought, Windows wouldn't start. Well okay then, at least my data is good, all I have to wait for is the new drive that's coming in about a week. I get back to my rig, plug the drive back in, and say to myself "Hell, let's see what happens if I boot from here". Well Windows loaded! And everythings here!! I'm currently backing everything up to an external 500GB drive, as I still think my drive is on the brink of going, and won't be returning the incoming drive.

 

Strange times in techland...

You caught a lucky break.  Good for you. Still your drive may have flaws, but if you can get away with cloning it to a new drive, hey that's stellar.  You have learned a valuable lesson that most folks only learn by experiencing total drive failure.  BACKUP - BACKUP - BACKUP.

 

In a perfect world, really critical stuff might even be backed up redundantly to a cloud server in addition to your local spare hard disk.

 

USB 3 drives are WAY faster than traditional USB 2.0 drives, but also require USB 3 ports on the motherboard or a USB 3.0 PCi upgrade card.  If you have a LARGE amount of data, I highly recommend a USB 3.0 solution as opposed to the old-school USB 2.

 

Another way to do the same thing would be to mount the backup drive INSIDE your PC case as a second SATA hard drive, and set that to receive all the backups.  SATA is light years faster than USB 2. 

The drive I got (http://www.amazon.com/RE4-Enterprise-Hard-Drive-WD1003FBYX/dp/B003SANWI6/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top) is highly reviewed, but many reviews say that it works best as part of a RAID configuration, which I don't have the interest nor the money to invest in. Should this drive work just as well as a stand alone drive?

You don't HAVE to RAID, but it's actually pretty useful. A RAID 1 configuration will give you an identical copy of everything you have, in case something like this happens again. 

 

A RAID 0 configuration is also handy, but you need 2 pretty reliable drives for it.

 

 

USB 3 drives are WAY faster than traditional USB 2.0 drives,

That's what it is. The drive is a WD "My passport" which seems to be a pretty solid drive, it's just about 10 gigs short of being able to hold my system image but oh well.

 

 

Another way to do the same thing would be to mount the backup drive INSIDE your PC case as a second SATA hard drie, and set that to receive all the backups.  SATA is light years faster than USB 2. 

 

Might as well...after the backup I guess I'll go ahead and do that.

 

 

 

You don't HAVE to RAID, but it's actually pretty useful.

What's the setup process? I mean it's not practical with this failing drive but I'm willing to give it a try just for proof of concept.

What's the setup process? I mean it's not practical with this failing drive but I'm willing to give it a try just for proof of concept.

I'm not exactly sure. 

 

I think it involves you connecting both drives, then enabling RAID in the BIOS, but I have never done it so I can't tell you exactly. 

 

This guide offers a good explanation of all the RAIDs possible, and how to set it up: http://www.pcworld.com/article/132877/RAID.html

 

But yea, definitely don't do it on the bad drive.

It certainly has been a stressful few days.

 

Old drive quit about midway through the backup, but luckily for me the new drive came the next day. I've been wrestling with my brothers computer, trying to get it to recognize my new drive. After it getting recognized, I attempted to clone my disk via Acronis True Image 2014, as recommended above. Well, that requires the "full version" of Acronis, so I bought that. After 2 days of waiting, my key has not come yet. 50 dollars down the drain. So I've begun the long slow process of reinstalling things. And I don't have a "legitimate" copy of Windows, as I installed off my disk but the activation key has been used once already, and obviously won't reactivate. So that's why I'm here.

 

Is there any to transfer a windows license from my old hard drive to this new one? It's the exact same CD I bought last June.

It certainly has been a stressful few days.

 

Old drive quit about midway through the backup, but luckily for me the new drive came the next day. I've been wrestling with my brothers computer, trying to get it to recognize my new drive. After it getting recognized, I attempted to clone my disk via Acronis True Image 2014, as recommended above. Well, that requires the "full version" of Acronis, so I bought that. After 2 days of waiting, my key has not come yet. 50 dollars down the drain. So I've begun the long slow process of reinstalling things. And I don't have a "legitimate" copy of Windows, as I installed off my disk but the activation key has been used once already, and obviously won't reactivate. So that's why I'm here.

 

Is there any to transfer a windows license from my old hard drive to this new one? It's the exact same CD I bought last June.

So you bought a OEM Windows license? Or did you not buy it?