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General discussion

Hard drive failure/ data transfer

by MTZ302 Dec 10, 2009 9:33AM PST

I am having problems with my computer locking up. When I check the event viewer I get a message Event ID: 51 Source: Disk. Doing a bit of research, the event ID 51 means that my hard drive is starting to fail. I have purchased a new hard drive, but I am unsure how to transfer all my data into the new drive. I have a 2gb that is partitioned into a C: drive and a D: drive. I want to put my OS (Window XP Home) on one drive and my information(pictures, games, music etc.) on another. If anyone can give me some help I would appreciate it.

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Risky if hard drive media is defective

by Steven Haninger Dec 12, 2009 7:27AM PST

I'm not sure which drive is which by your post. If your failing drive is the one with two partitions, you can try cloning it to the new drive and resizing the partitions during that process. It will take software to do that but if you have unreadable sectors the transfer is likely to fail. If the new drive is partitioned, you cannot transfer the OS and have it boot. You could do a clean installation and transfer readable data from the defective drive by other methods but you'd have to lose any pre-partitioning and formatting to do that.

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