backing up a failing hard drive , how do i.......

silverdale

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My PC hard drive seems to be playing up. Sometimes it boots and the odd time I get that click and freeze. I'm not going to wait for it to fail so If I buy a new hard drive whats the best way to backup my files so I can transfer them over to a new hard drive or ghost the entire hard drive over to a new hard drive (which I prefer). There's about 200gb of files. I do have a hot swap USB caddie attached to the PC as well.
Hope I make sense as I've never done it before
 
Theres free cloning software out there as well , like Easeus Todo backup home or Macrium reflect among others , put your new hard drive in caddy and you can clone all the partitions exactly or just the windows and boot partitions then copy rest of your data
 
I tried the acronis , I made a bootable CD and booted from CD. I have an hard drive attached to the PC using a hotswap caddie (destination for the img or backup or files) but Acronis doesn't see the usb caddie and the biggest stick I have it 128gb.

How do I get round that
 
I tried the acronis , I made a bootable CD and booted from CD. I have an hard drive attached to the PC using a hotswap caddie (destination for the img or backup or files) but Acronis doesn't see the usb caddie and the biggest stick I have it 128gb.

How do I get round that
hi, does your pc recognize your external hdd, just a thought
 
In windows it just picks it up but booting from CD with Acronis it says "Only one hard drive is connected....." and when I check through Acronis it doesn't pick it up
 
In windows it just picks it up but booting from CD with Acronis it says "Only one hard drive is connected....." and when I check through Acronis it doesn't pick it up
had this problem with a new samsung .m2 ssd, eventually used the samsung migration software and this worked.
 
You can image the drive from within Windows using Acronis, the bootable CD is for recovery if you didn't install the Acronis tools or the drive died.
 
give that a try

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in windows 10 can you see the drive in Disk Management ?
 
When using an *ahem* Acronis it's worth seeing if the thing boots after cloning because I had a non-critical situation where it wasn't properly activated :).
 
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