Copying old hard drive to new

[mrfrogs]

The technicians at the shop are having trouble copying my old drive to the new one. They say they have only managed to copy 80% of the old drive. They keep getting error messages or something. Will my computer stll work with this 80%? I mean will I be able to reinstall the software that wasn't copied? Another question?
Is it possible to have both drives installed and working on the same PC? So that I can alternate between them?

[Sterling_Aug]

The odds of your system working with only 80% is somewhere between slim and none.

I would use Norton Ghost to do a copy of the drive to a new drive, then format the old drive and leave it in the system for a swap file, and as extra data storage. Ghost should take all of 5 mins. to copy the drive.

[daveleau]

The problems they got were probably because of bad sectors ont he drive. I would get the data that was important and then start from fresh. I had a similar job where I got 90% of the data transferred before the errors made me stop and the system booted fine and about 50% of the apps ran (ran right? not sure). I backed up the important stuff and then reformatted. You may not have a DEAD drive though as some bad sectors are caused by the OS while others are caused by dying drives... Can't tell til you low level format the drive. If bad sectors remain, toss the drive off something very tall...

Good luck
Dave

[NDC]

Yeah, I agree with Dave. It's most likely due to bad sectors on the disk surface. But another reason it may not be copying is because the file that needs to be copied has errors which is causing it to be unreadable.

[elroy]

Test the drive with Spinrite 5 www.grc.com