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**pjp[_5_]**

In article , lid
says...

"Paul" schreef in bericht
...
Linea Recta wrote:
My PC had always been very sluggish compared to my old laptop.
When reading a PC magazine I read an article about Crystal diskinfo.
Decided to download the portable version ans ran it on the laptop:
diagnose OK.

Decided to run it also on the PC: WARNING for the C drive! (see below)
Is my C drive dying?
Apart from fitting a new drive this is going to be A LOT of work,
installing and updating Windows 7 and A LOT of applications!
I suppose I can't restore a Macrium image on the replacement drive?

Be aware that "Reallocated Sector Count" does not mean
data is corrupted. It means a sector was detected as
being less than functional, and was replaced by a
spare. Only a certain percentage of the total drive
capacity is available for sparing, so it will run
out eventually.

If you were to scan the drive and found no CRC errors,
you could easily make a backup of the drive as it stands.
Then restore the drive to a replacement hard drive. No
need to reinstall an OS or anything. Just use your
backup/restore program in Clone mode.

Take the following information, collected over three days.

Current Worst Threshold Data Status
Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 36 0 OK
Reallocated Sector Count 100 100 36 57 OK
Reallocated Sector Count 98 98 36 104 OK

On the third day, drive life is at 98%, and there are
104 reallocated sectors. That implies the spare sector
count remaining is roughly 5000 sectors (spread over the disk, not
all in one spot). I have used up 2% of them.

The reallocations tend to show up, if I write the drive
from end to end. I tend to see more of them after writing
the whole drive.

Note that the top line implies "perfect health". But the
whole thing is a sham. The reading is actually thresholded.
No drive leaves the factory in "perfect" condition. So
what you're looking at, is a portion of drive life.
The reason the statistic is not entirely accurate, is to

Cloning a drive is taking a "snapshot" of the drive and duplicating it
on another drive. This snapshot info can aslo be stored in an "image"
file. Restoring is taking an "image file" created from a disk and
placing it on another (or same as one created) disk.

Think of that like a DVD is physcial and you can make a copy of it and
burn it on another dvd. You can also create an "image" of the dvd which
can be used to recreate a dvd, e..g. an iso file. Note - the image is
simply a file, it's contents store the information it needs to recreate
the dvd, kinda like a zip file in that aspect.