Hard Drive Buzzing

Alright well as you can probably guess, my hard drive is giving off a loud buzzing sound. So it looks like there will be a new hard drive in the future for me. Now my question is, what should I do now so that I can backup everything, and then return to where I am now with my new hard drive. I use a 6860-FX and still have the Gateway disk that came with it. I also have an external hard drive for use. Thanks all.

 

You can use some retail programs that can do an image of your current machine like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image.

There's a lot of open source alternatives. Look on this site to find out:
http://packratstudios.com/index.php...ghost-who-a-list-of-open-source-alternatives/


But the first two are the ones that are widely used and known to do good.

 

Ok sounds good I guess. Now to be able to use the image I will still have to have windows installed first right?

 

Well, once you do an image of your machine, the program should tell you how to restore it. (If im not mistaken, you dont need to have Windows or in some people's case, Linux installed on your machine)

One thing I know from the P-6860FX is that you can run another machine with the image on it on the network and you can just plug in your laptop on a wired network and it will scan for any machines that have an image copy.

But that is probably too much of a hassle, go for the CD/DVD backups

 

Haha yeah you just blew my mind a little bit. So the programs you mentioned will burn an image onto a cd/dvd, whichever I choose?

 

Well, I know Norton Ghost does, I havent used Acronis yet but I know some friends that rely on them than Norton (Symantec) Ghost.

For Norton Ghost, you can choose to backup from a CD/DVD or you can make another partition on your hard drive which will act as an image of your machine.

 

Oh I see, that's pretty cool. Well thanks I'll look into this and I appreciate it.