Hard disk help

A month ago I bought myself a new Hard Disk. I initially wanted a
Seagate 80GB, but since my local computer shop guy didn't have it, he
gave me a Hitachi Deskstar 80GB instead. The price was about the same,
and he vouched for the quality, so I bought it. I should've researched
it a bit, but I didn't.

Last night, when I was searching for a file, the disk started making
some pretty strange sounds. It wasn't loud, just a mild sort of
rattling-sliding noise while that disk was being accessed. So i figured
it's about to die, and unplugged the disk. It's sitting safe and
untouched now. Still working, no data loss yet, thankfully.

Anyway, since it's only a month old, it's still in the guarantee
period, and the replacement is soon coming. What I wanted to know is,
is there a way to mirror the entire contents of the drive to the new
disk? I would like to keep the partition information as well. In case
it matters, It has a 20GB ext2 partition, a 1GB linux swap partition,
and 3 FAT32 partitions.

(BTW: The fun started when I realized at 11 PM that I had installed my
bootloader on the drive which I unplugged. Two hours to fix the damn
MBR: 1hour 59 minutes 30 seconds to get a bootable USB drive, and 30
seconds to boot and type FDISK /MBR. Yay.)

Hitachi drives are usually not too bad. I've recently had some issues with my IBM (same exact thing). It seems there are some issues with the logic board, however, strange sounds means something internal in which case there is something actually wrong (which is an eventuality with anything). (I had to recenter the logic board for better contact, if you're curious on something you may have to deal with some day, don't worry though.)

You can use "Drive Image", it'll make a 1:1 image of your drive. It's the same type of deal placed like Dell use with new computers, they just unpack an image onto a brand new drive, BAM, insta-usable.

I think drive image costs money though, I doubt there are any quality free ones out there unless you find a nice one under the GNU license or something.

But have a look. (Norton Ghost apparently does the same thing ... but I don't know if you can do it with a blank drive. Never used it)

http://www.drive-image.com/

Might be able to find a trial or ... a free version.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

ive used norton ghost a lot, its an excellent peice of software, you can even make a backup to a network drive!

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I need a new sig

Crono, you should know by now that in the world of the internet, all software is free :razz:

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

I've read that the linux dd can be used, and it works well too. I could probably boot from a live CD, and do

dd if=<old HDD device> of=<new HDD device>

with the right parameters.

I downloaded a trial of Drive Image. (15 days, fully functional). I'll install it once I get the new drive.

I can't find a trial for Norton Ghost and the "free" version requires
me to burn to a CD. My writer has been conked for a while (unrelated
incident) so I can't do that.

Thanks guys. If anyone has any more ideas please tell me. I want to make sure I dont mess anything up.

Dred, the only reason I suggested Drive Image over Ghost was because I don't know if Ghost has a boot utility. Which is pretty important, especially in this situation.

I hope it all works out.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.