Restoring from a system image to a new HD question

[Russ Smith]

my girlfriend's sony Vaio is failing again already. The new hard drive was installed in late January after the original failed in 11 months. I think this one is my fault although kind of touchy, I dropped the laptop about 1 foot onto a pillow by accident. It restarted and came up saying it had not shut down properly, 2 days later it wouldn't start windows and then went into check disk by itself, deleted some bad files and otherwise passed that and then the Sony diagnostics. This morning it failed to restart again although a reboot got it again to go into checkdisk.

I'd already ordered a replacement drive, they're getting scarce so I just ordered a 2nd one and this one is coming tomorrow supposedly.

I have a system image from when I first set up the new hard drive in Feb, and it's currently running so I could do another one now I suspect.

So my question is 2 parts, what's smarter restore from the system image from Feb or do another image today and restore from that? My suspicion is February since it was stable then. part 2, I don't have to reinstall Windows I just boot off the repair CD and then tell it to restore from the external drive, would I be smart to do this on BOTH replacement drives or just one and wait a bit until I have the new one all set and then do another image to restore from later? Just wondering if installing from an image on a drive in any way starts the process of it going bad.

 

[Chaz]

As long as the file system is OK I would just clone the drive from the current disk.

It shouldn't cause the new drive to go bad. Just run a full surface scan check disk to correct any lingering file system issues.

 

[Russ Smith]

As long as the file system is OK I would just clone the drive from the current disk.

It shouldn't cause the new drive to go bad. Just run a full surface scan check disk to correct any lingering file system issues.

Interesting I was assuming it was better to use the image than clone it but it would certainly be easier to clone it.

thanks again.

 

[Russ Smith]

Cloned the drive last night from 640 to 640 I kept the new 750 as the spare for now in case the new drive eventually fails.

Had no idea how poorly the drive was performing until I replaced it. Even my girlfriend noticed last night how much more responsive the laptop is.

I have to admit I'm amazed the more I read about restoring, I get that MS is concerned people are in effect making free copies of their software but it's bizarre to me that they design a program to make an image you can restore from but create it so it only lets you restore to the very thing that's failing. There are apparently ways around it with Disk Partition but the reality is if you google it you find out how many people were as surprised as I was to find out having a stable image on an external HD doesn't mean you can restore from it on a new HD if your old one fails. It's not designed to do that.