Old Dell Secondary HD Replacement

Greetings,
My wife's old Dell came with a 100G HD. A few years ago, I threw an old 40G
2nd HD in it because she was running out of space. She had purchased Adobe
Photoshop so I had her install that (because of the size of the installation
& the lack of space on the original drive) on the secondary drive & also use
the drive to store her photos. Lately she started to get some corrupted
photos & Photoshop was hanging etc. I ran CheckDisk on the 40G drive & sure
enough, many sectors were bad & were remapped. Things ran well after that &
on a side note, I was able to complete an Acronis backup image for the first
time in over a month without errors halting it. However, it is clear that
that the 40G is near the end of its life.
I purchased a 500G WD replacement & hooked it as a slave to the DVD burner &
formatting it as I type. My question is, after formatting the 500G would it
be better to:

1) Just copy the entire contents of the failing 40G drive to the 500G drive,
replace the 40G with the 500G acquiring the 40G's existing drive letter & be
on my way.

or
2) Restore the Acronis image of the 40G drive to the 500G drive, replace the
40G with the 500G acquiring the 40G's existing drive letter & be on my way.

My concerns with choice #1 (copying) are that somehow Photoshop wouldn't
function properly because registry settings may conflict because the HD's
are no longer the same. My concerns with choice #2 (restoring image) are
that somehow weird bad sector remappings, etc. would be imaged to the new
500G drive causing it to either malfunction someway or cause loss of usable
space due to the remapping of bad sectors that no longer exist on the new
drive.

Any suggestions are appreciated!

Regards,
Rich


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"WaIIy" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 17 Apr 2010 12:48:05 -0700, "Rich" wrote:

Greetings,
My wife's old Dell came with a 100G HD. A few years ago, I threw an old
40G
2nd HD in it because she was running out of space. She had purchased
Adobe
Photoshop so I had her install that (because of the size of the
installation
& the lack of space on the original drive) on the secondary drive & also
use
the drive to store her photos. Lately she started to get some corrupted
photos & Photoshop was hanging etc. I ran CheckDisk on the 40G drive &
sure
enough, many sectors were bad & were remapped. Things ran well after that
&
on a side note, I was able to complete an Acronis backup image for the
first
time in over a month without errors halting it. However, it is clear that
that the 40G is near the end of its life.
I purchased a 500G WD replacement & hooked it as a slave to the DVD burner
&
formatting it as I type. My question is, after formatting the 500G would
it
be better to:

1) Just copy the entire contents of the failing 40G drive to the 500G
drive,
replace the 40G with the 500G acquiring the 40G's existing drive letter &
be
on my way.

or
2) Restore the Acronis image of the 40G drive to the 500G drive, replace
the
40G with the 500G acquiring the 40G's existing drive letter & be on my
way.

My concerns with choice #1 (copying) are that somehow Photoshop wouldn't
function properly because registry settings may conflict because the HD's
are no longer the same. My concerns with choice #2 (restoring image) are
that somehow weird bad sector remappings, etc. would be imaged to the new
500G drive causing it to either malfunction someway or cause loss of
usable
space due to the remapping of bad sectors that no longer exist on the new
drive.

Any suggestions are appreciated!

Regards,
Rich

Perhaps -

Image the C drive

Use that image on the new drive

Pull off whatever stuff off your current 40 gig

Install the old C drive as a second drive (if you need it)

Install Photoshop clean, on the now new c drive


Absolutely, that was my ideal solution that I pitched to her (I have a full,
current Acronis image of the entire system). However, this computer is the
nexus of the household with her Outlook calendar for the kids' sports ,
practices, rehearsals, school events, etc., etc. She just wanted to replace
the 40G before it failed & I had an hour or so window of opportunity today.
Anything more elaborate was uncomfortable to her. This is definitely a
"patch" just to replace the failing drive as is. I plan to swap the drives
in the future & do just that. In the mean time, would restoring the image of
a failing, checkdisk-repaired drive to a new drive cause any problems? Which
solution would be better in the short run, #1 or #2?
Thanks for answering.

Rich


__________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 5036 (20100417) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com