replacing laptop hard drive

[emperor76]

Hi, doing a repair for someone's laptop, same person, 2 laptops, 3rd failed hard drive, starting to think it's something he's doing to them, he does tend to throw them around a bit, just ordered a new 2.5 WD scorpio blue 160gb for £25, I still have his old failed hard drive which I'm still able to access from my desktop computer and for the first time I'm going to attempt a drive clone to get it back to the condition it was in before his 1st drive failed, would you clone the entire drive, or just specific partitions? thanks

 

[evan.briggs]

You would clone the entire drive. Make sure you clone the MR with it best program to use is probably clonezilla. It's free

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[emperor76]

You would clone the entire drive. Make sure you clone the MR with it best program to use is probably clonezilla. It's free

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Thanks, I did download a bootable easus clone program, I struggled to find a download for clonezilla, but I shall have a look for one, Ultimate boot cd also seems to have clone utilities, not sure which one's yet, not got round to having a look what's on there yet though

 

[evan.briggs]

Eases should work as well

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[IAntDemo]

Tell him to punch a wall because we all know he punches the laptop, I use todo it and always mess my hdd up, I have patience now lol went threw about 6 hard drives in 2years on a dell lol

 

[emperor76]

I think he generally runs around with it a lot, he has autism so I don't think he can help it, so I'm usually happy to do repairs for him for just the price of the parts, I did notice a slight rattle from the broken hard drive when I shook it, I did open one that was damaged beyond repair out of curiosity the other day and I noticed there was a very fragile looking plate, which I'm guessing the data is stored on, I was wondering if the rattle I could hear was part of that disk broken off? in which case I'm guessing it took quite some trauma, but this is just guess work from an amateur

 

[Mossiac]

It would take a hell of a wack for part of one of the plates to brake off. Or an ill timed wack.

Does he have regular back up habits? If not might be worth doing for him in future.

Mossiac

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[emperor76]

It would take a hell of a wack for part of one of the plates to brake off. Or an ill timed wack.

Does he have regular back up habits? If not might be worth doing for him in future.

Mossiac

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He doesn't have back up habits, to be fair, there's never much that needs backing up, he pretty much fills it with fruit machine programs and uses it for that, you tube and Facebook, I have now got into a habit of making a driver disk for every computer I work on, which comes in handy if I work on it again. I will look at backing his operating system up though. I was also considering getting one of these if I'm going to be working on laptops a bit, as I'm thinking it will be of much use when it come's to cloning disks, and probably safer for the drives as well. StarTech.com 2 Drive 2.5 inch Trayless Hot Swap SATA Mobile Rack Backplane Storage bay Adaptor (Black) - HSB220SAT25B - CCL Computers

 

[strollin]

Maybe an SSD would work better for the guy.

 

[emperor76]

Maybe an SSD would work better for the guy.

That did cross my mind but not until after ordering, I think it was about 30gb for £35 I think and never used them before, might be worth a try if it happens again.