What to Do After Having Replaced a Failing Hard Drive

As you may have read on this blog before (earlier post), I recently suffered a hard drive failure. Well, this is what I did to recover my data.

When I got my laptop back from the Apple store, they said that they didn’t transfer the data from the old HD to the new one. They had returned the old HD to me the way it was. The first thing I did was go out and buy a 2.5’’ SATA external HD enclosure. Then, from another computer, I downloaded an app called Superduper onto my pen drive. Finally, I put the old HD into the enclosure and booted from it. I was ready to go!

The old HD was obviously bootable since it was originally in my laptop. I installed Superduper on the HD and used it to make the new HD (inside the laptop) a bit by bit copy of the the old one. This was a very painless process as all I had to do was set it up, and from there onwards, it did all the work. It took about 3 hours to copy all 170GB of my HD’s contents.

After restarting my laptop and booting from the new drive, I found it to be just as I had left the old drive. Everything was exactly in place, and it looked and felt the same! I was very happy that I found that my HD was failing before it actually did, and that I found a clear method on how to fix the problem of transferring the data.

What have I learned, and what should you? Back up! Hard drives failures happen. The question isn’t “will it happen”. It is “when will it happen” because the answer is “eventually!” If you don’t happen to catch the failure in time, you might loose all your data, which may mean a lot of memories and non-replaceable items. So if you take away one thing from this article, it is that you should back up!

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