One of the desktop machines at work had an alert come up a while back — Disk in Predictive Failure — so I made preparations to replace it. From what I’d read, when the SMART status on a disk tells you something like that, the drive will be toast; it could be an hour or it could be a year, but sooner or later it’s gonna bite the dust.
Having done this numerous times on Macs, the process of replacing a drive ought to be the same, right? So first things first, I installed Retrospect Client on it (we use Retrospect for backing up the company servers, and have unlimited licenses for clients) and backed up the whole drive, then bought a replacement drive. The machine is a Dell Dimension, and it had the original Seagate 160GB SATA drive; I didn’t think it was important to replace it with an identical drive, so I bought a Hitachi replacement of the same size. I wasn’t excited about the whole reinstall-from-scratch prospect, so I asked around for recommendations for a good Windows disk cloning solution — Norton’s Ghost is probably the industry leader, but I heard good recommendations for Acronis as well, so I downloaded a copy of their Migrate Easy software to try out.
The first go didn’t go well; Migrate Easy seemed to clone the disk alright, but when I pulled out the original drive and tried booting from the new it errored on something or other. I tried it again, varying the settings a bit to see if I could work through the problem; same result. One more try; ditto. I checked the Acronis support page, but found no help there other than an email submission form. I filled it out, describing my problem, then put the machine back together with the original drive, and left it as is; I didn’t have any more time to mess with it that day. I still haven’t heard anything back from Acronis.
Things got really busy at work after that, plus the machine’s user seems to be there every day but weekends (I hate working Saturdays, and won’t work Sundays) so procrastination set in. Thankfully the drive kept humming along, and I was able to work on it when I chose. I wanted to be able to set aside at least a couple of hours so that if I had some success I could make sure the job was complete and everything was working. Well, days turned into weeks, and before I knew it more than a month had gone by, and my trial version expired before I got back to it. Wanting to see if I could work out the issues I had with Acronis, I spent the $40 or so to buy a license and took another stab at it a week ago, but got much the same results. I went through the clone procedure a number of different ways and still came up with the blue screen when it was booting up. Crud. If it’s duplicating the disk block-for-block as I’m assuming it does, why is it that there is something obviously wrong with the OS on the new disk that keeps it from booting properly?
Last weekend — another Saturday, of course — I jumped on the project again, and finally completed it. What ended up working was to use Acronis to duplicate the disk, then boot up from the OEM installer CD and reinstall the OS. I was hoping the installer could just repair the installation, but nope… so I just had it install a clean OS (which was of course XP Pro SP 2, whereas the machine had been running SP 3.) Once I tracked down the NIC drivers & got them installed, I was able to get on the network and install the Retrospect Client software. When that was done I configured the machine as a client on the server that did the backup, and told it to restore the disk. In spite of some warnings from Retrospect against restoring an OS that’s newer than what’s running, everything went great.
After Retrospect finished, I rebooted the client, and Retrospect did a little housecleaning, then automatically rebooted again and ran its cleanup utility, again. But it sure seemed to be a solid running machine. It still had the second Windows install folder, so that got trashed, then I ran a defrag on the hard drive… So far, so good.
But I’m still left wondering why the whole procedure had to be so difficult… On it’s own, Acronis failed. I read something online about Acronis not being fond of cloning to a different type of disk; maybe I’d have had better luck if the replacement disk was the same brand/size. I dunno. I probably should’ve done the whole thing with Retrospect and saved myself some hassle; it still would’ve involved installing an operating system the new drive, but it wouldn’t have duplicated the two hidden partitions on the drive. I guess I won’t know if Norton would’ve done the job without getting Retrospect involved unless another machine gives the same problem and I try it, or I test it just for fun.
What I do know is that the same job on a Mac would’ve been much more straightforward; using Carbon Copy Cloner, the job would’ve been done the first time around. And if it were in OS 9… No 3rd-party utilities needed; just hook up the new drive to the machine, format the drive & let the Finder copy everything over. So much easier. But like cockroaches, Windows boxes are pretty well entrenched, and they aren’t going away any time soon. Sigh.