System whines then dies

SqualidChimp · 4 Jun 2011 at 12:45

I've had a bad morning. All ready to play some games, maybe get some work done, etc, then had to spend the last 2 hours trying to fix this.

While posting this I've been listening closer trying to see where this whine of death is coming from. On startup, it sounds like my boot drive is going into overdrive/hyperspeed immediately before crash. I've eventually managed (after about 20 or so attempts) to get it to boot and disk check says every thing is normal, no errors etc, except that there is still this occasional discordant sound coming from the hdd direction. Time to backup files? I cant be bothered with the hassle of resinstalling hundreds of gb of programs :'( so what's the quickest way of getting a replacement drive in there, and effectively cloning the old disk that's on its way out onto a new one? That's if I can get it to boot again of course... scared to turn it off at the moment - and yes, Im getting all documents etc off right now, and I do backup most of them quite regularly anyway.

Virtual pint (of your choice!) for any good advice offered.

Surveyor · 4 Jun 2011 at 12:48

If you have Windows 7 and another HDD (an external one will do) then just create a disk image and a Windows 7 recovery CD.

Get a new HDD, boot from recovery CD and restore the image to the new drive.

The only caveat is that the new disk needs to be at least as large as the disk you made the image from.

SqualidChimp · 4 Jun 2011 at 12:50

where does the disk image need to be stored? on a third hdd? and this would hold everything from the imaged disk? (sorry, never did this before)

EDIT: oh yeah, I have software raid on other disks - I guess I will just have to hope that it will all work afterwards...

Surveyor · 4 Jun 2011 at 12:58

SqualidChimp said:
where does the disk image need to be stored? on a third hdd? and this would hold everything from the imaged disk? (sorry, never did this before)

Yes, you'd need a second disk now to store the image of your system drive and then restore the image to a third new disk.

Most people have an external drive they can use for this purpose.