Am I grinding to a halt? I must backup system!

[gusbrunston]

[tt]
Hi:

I've got a grinding noise that I've lived with for a couple of days. What's the best guess?

I recently replaced a dead power supply.

The noise sound is coincidental with HD activity light.

It is absolutely essential that I back up including system files, that would allow me to restore all programs and data to a new HD if necessary, before I mess around inside the box.

What's the best way to back up this way? I'm running Windows 2000 Pro, and I back up with the built-in backup program, but I don't see if I'm getting the system backed up.

I also have a backup program called "Retrospect" which I think came with my USB2 Hard Drive.

Thank you for reading this post, and I would appreciate your opinions.[/tt]

[tt]
Gus Brunston - Access2000/2002(DAO)[/tt]

 

[jrbarnett]

Buy Ghost, Drive Image or similar and then write an image of your C: drive (and any other partitions on this disk) to your external HDD (if its big enough).

Once you've done this, replace the HDD and restore the image.

John

 

[tpman]

Gus, If you don't want to mess around inside the box I would suggest getting a usb external hard drive. Now, you can do one of a couple of things, you could ghost your drive and put the ghost image onto the external hard drive. You could simply go out and copy everything that you want to keep, like pics, doc's, mp3's, etc onto the external and just reload your app's on your replacement hard drive, cause it does sound like your current hard drive is on it's last legs. Grinding = no good.

 

[micker377]

Use an imaging program (Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image, etc.). You can save this onto the USB drive. When the new hard drive is installed, "restore" the image from the USB drive to the new drive. How big (mbytes) is the USB drive? When you start to do the backup, it will tell you how much space you need for the image (My XP system takes 14 gig). Once everything is working OK, you can start making monthly system backups.

Then you can laugh at any future hard drive failures!

 

[Xaqte]

See here for a few recommended back up applications:

thread531-702522

 

[gusbrunston]

[tt]
Thanks to all of you responding!

I have successfully backed up my c: drive onto the USB2.0 hard drive (about 13 gigabytes.) I have also created an emergency repair disk.

At looking at the link syggested by "xaqte", I saw Retrospect by Dantz and found the Dantz web site. Since I have Retrospect Express, I will now explore their procedure called "Duplicate", and see if that makes the image I will need when I install a new HD.

Thanks again.[/tt]

[tt]
Gus Brunston - Access2000/2002(DAO)[/tt]