WOW! A quick Hard drive fix. For those who know what they are doing only!!!!!!

  To make a long story short, I was using 2 hard drives, one external "USB" and one internal.

I basically kept a backup of everything on my external hard drive.

 I had an older hard drive that was an external that I didn't even use anymore because it was smaller than the current external hard drive that I use. So it was setting to the side not doing nothing.

Just the other day my primary internal hard drive just started clicking, and shortly after crashed or failed to work that is.

I got to thinking about it and realized that perhaps my old external hard drive which was a USB drive might be a normal hard drive that I could install and restore my previous hard drive too because I figured that it was just a normal hard drive with a bit more hardware connections around it. Chassis I should say perhaps.

Sure enough it was,  I opened up the old USB Hard drive external drive, and I found that there was a normal internal hard drive with the same connections I needed to use as my INTERNAL primary drive.  I just removed it or unplugged it from the old  USB hard drive chassis and installed it as a normal internal hard drive, then I used Acronis to restore my settings from my current USB hard drive External backups to my NEW internal hard drive.

 I had to adjust the hard drive one step further to make it recognize the size because it was a larger hard drive than my previous internal hard drive. So I used http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/ FREE,  to correct the size of the hard drive I just installed, so and I am right back up and running with no problems. It was an upgrade actually because what I was using before was a smaller hard drive.  I went form an internal 120 GB drive to a 160 GB drive.

The reason I mention this is it's something to think about. Especially after a hard drive crash like I had.

ONCE AGAIN : IF YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS!

I like to think I do know a bit about what I am doing, and in my case it worked out great for me.

Keep in mind, there is always a static problem you have to consider. For those who understand what I am talking about and who are in the same or similar situation such as I was perhaps this might help. Just thought I would mention it incase you don't think of this option and have it and know what and how to do what I am talking about.

Best of luck, hope this helps someone.

Serious Noize!

Jumbicat


Yep...To quicken a backup of an external, I'll usally take it out and make it an internal for the period of time to get the data. But you are correct in that if one doesn't know what they're doing...  I've also swapped external drives with larger internals.

That's an interesting Idea. I'll have to try and remember that. Thanks.  Little things like that are big when you can't just go out and buy new stuff right away and need to continue working.

While my internal primary was going bad I didn't take into account that the more I checked it out by moving the PC around, the more I was creating possible problems with my cable connections.  Something else to think about, although it was working when I could get it loaded I didn't take that into account and it resulted in a few cables I have not responding correctly, working but just not 100%. Just thought I would mention this incase someone else runs into this type of scenario.

Most might say "Just go out and buy a new hard drive and the problem is solved", that's easy to say if you have money lying around, but if you are like me then most of you probably don't, so some of these fix it idea's can help if you have the expertise. That's the only reason I mentioned this.

Thanks again for the reply, there's lot's of issue's to think about here. But as I said and will continue to say if you don't know what your doing DON'T DO IT!

Serious Noize!

Guitarhacker


very cool.

I have taken a C drive that crashed and refused to boot, installed it as a secondary internal drive with a jumper change, and... after installing a new C drive with OS, was able to see it and copy all the data off that I needed.

It seemed to function OK as a secondary but after I recovered the data, I pulled it out and replaced it with a new secondary.... no need to take unnecessary chances with data....

That's cool! Up until this hard drive bit the dust it wouldn't boot and just clicked, so what I done to get it running for a little while was loaded Acronis from CD, once it loaded instead of selecting the Acronis programs I selected "Windows" from the first screen of the program and that worked for a short while.  After a while nothing worked. But for a short while as long as I didn't power off I could use that hard drive.

I should have mentioned that I did have to change the jumper on the external to CS for it to work internally on my system.
I can't say that will work for all hard drives, I've read where some external USB hard drives have different connections, some people claim they are all the same. I dunno since I haven't owned them all.

The one I took the hard drive out of was a Simple Tech, it had a Western Digital hard drive inside.

Something kind of funny that I didn't mention, before I thought of the external HD idea I had one other option, it was an old 6 GB hard drive out of this ancient PC I have with Windows 2000 on it, I managed to install Vista Basic on it and had almost 1 GB of space left before updating. I couldn't bare to run it though, it took 12 minutes from power on to desktop with nothing else installed.  

I hope sometime in the near future to upgrade to a newer desktop, at the minimum a dual core. I have an emachine and from the second I bought it the fan has ran all the time, with nothing else plugged into it or any extra programs installed, it's really irritating. After doing a search on google I found several people complaining about the very same problem. This makes me think that a lot of the components in it are cheap so perhaps that's why the fan is set to run all the time. I even went into the bios to try and see if I could change it with no luck no matter what I selected. I'm not saying they're all like that, but mine is.