One of my internal hard drives is failing - can I move everything to the other drive after backing up data?

[dannyc75]

I've got a fairly old Dell Dimension 9200 (DXP061) with two internal hard drives - both Samsung 320 GB (SAMSUNG HD321KJ). If one is failing, can I move all my data to the other and remove/replace the failed one?

I'm getting this message on my desktop: 'A drive in a RAID 0 volume is failing. Try to backup data immediately'.

I've backed up all of my files externally.

Thanks for your help.

 

[hang-the-9]

It's in RAID 0, your two drives are seen as one in the system so what you want to do won't work.

If you have all your files backed up, you can simply clone the system as it is now to the external drive, swap out the failing drive, and restore the system. It should work the same way as it has before. You'd want to have the backup done just in case something goes wrong or the drive fails in middle of cloning.

RAID 0 is usually not the best idea as it basically doubles your chances of data loss.

 

[dannyc75]

It's in RAID 0, your two drives are seen as one in the system so what you want to do won't work.

If you have all your files backed up, you can simply clone the system as it is now to the external drive, swap out the failing drive, and restore the system. It should work the same way as it has before. You'd want to have the backup done just in case something goes wrong or the drive fails in middle of cloning.

RAID 0 is usually not the best idea as it basically doubles your chances of data loss.

Thanks a lot for your reply, that's really useful to know. It looks like quite a lot of my system data is already corrupt. Now that I've backed up all of my personal files, do you think replacing both drives with a single new drive and re-installing Windows would be a better solution than cloning the system and swapping out just one of the old drives, so that I can't start afresh?

 

[hang-the-9]

I don't like using RAID 0 unless you have good backups. If you backup your files regularly, you can replace the drive and just set everything up as a a RAID 0 setup.

Or you can get an SSD which is a lot faster than a RAID 0 using regular drives, and use your existing good drive for backup and storage.

 

[dannyc75]

I don't like using RAID 0 unless you have good backups. If you backup your files regularly, you can replace the drive and just set everything up as a a RAID 0 setup.

Or you can get an SSD which is a lot faster than a RAID 0 using regular drives, and use your existing good drive for backup and storage.

Many thanks for your help.