Adventures of a hard drive swap w/ UBCD!

Consider this a helpful blog from your buddy ctrl...or think of it as ctrl writing about some crap that the technorati have known about for years...or, if you must, think of it as more mindless babble...err...helpful babble.

I just ran across an issue of my laptop losing a drive, no not a furkin' Ferrari laptop that the blog elite got, just a homely little acer...THAT RULES! Anyhow...the drive started making that BEE-DONG noise that is a sure sign that things aren't fairing well for the ole' drive. Sure enough after running checkdisk there were some bad sectors...and after awhile...more bad sectors. So, I had to order a drive prior to Christmas as a replacement, thanks to poor delivery by a delivery company that will remain nameless, I had to wait until after New Years to get it. All the while my BEE-BONG became more frequent, as well as the ever increasing bad sectors, and the tension from day to day wondering when my replacement drive would arrive was driving me nuts. I finally received my drive and no sooner than getting the box did I tear into it like Rosie O'Donnell did to Donald Trump (and vice versa :S)! I was so scared of losing data, even though I do backups to an external drive, I couldn't wait to get that new drive in. Fujitsu 80gb w/ 8mb cache...which was a lot better than the 40gb 2mb cache Fujitsu that was in it. However a thought crossed my mind..."Do I really want to reinstall all my crap again?"...simple answer was "NO!". I had used the many Linux live CD distros that are out there, Knoppix/ubuntu/Sabayon/BackTrack|Auditor, but wanted to try something new to image. I also had some experience with Bart's Bootable, but again...been there done that...so this time I wanted to try UBCD. I decided to just go check it out at first and see what default tools it had...as I didn't want to go down the Bart's route and deal with the setting up the various plug-ins and so on. After viewing the UBCD site, checking the tools, and finally downloading the ISO to burn I was off on my adventure of drive replacement.

Now that I have my CD...I reboot the laptop and boot from CD (UBCD) in order to make an image of my hard drive prior to replacement. Upon booting you have the option of what you want to do from a dos boot loader, pretty cool, that had an option of disk management, windows repair, or boot into the live cd...live I go. Once the scaled down windows boots you also have an option to pick what profile you wanted...I stuck with the default and boom...your in...I didn't play too much...as the BEE-DONG noise was happening again. So I went through the Hard Disk Tools and started Drive Image XML as I had heard of it before and wanted to try it out. In launching Drive Image it had a very straight forward GUI to guide you through the whole imaging process (select the drive you want to copy, select where you want the image and name the image). The coolest thing I liked about Drive Image XML was the fact that before you actually start the image it will warn you 3 times what you are about to do and on the final alert...you have to type in a security word before you can continue. This I am sure will scare the hell out of a newbie and probably make them exit...and gives the folks that have had some experience verify the drive information. Well...the process of imaging started and it took awhile...as it was putting the image on a USB drive, which is another cool thing about these Windows Live CD's, Bart's and this knockoff (using Bart's as it's core) UBCD, is that it truly acts like windows...so you can see your USB devices and so on.

Once the image was done...I pulled the drive out of my non-Ferrari laptop and played hell getting these little ass screws off this casing I put on the drive, for heat dispersion, and after the needle nose pliers came out from where I stripped the little bastards...the new drive was ready to be put in. I put my HD heatsink on the new drive, again I had to break out the needle nose to get those shitty little screws back on that I stripped as I have no other tiny ass screws, and into my non-Ferrari laptop it went. I booted back into UBCD and launched Drive Image XML and went to restore my image, which I might add took about half the time...sweet new drive :) After the image was restored I rebooted and booyah...back in business.

I did go back and look around on the UBCD, rebooted again after I made sure my XP was up and running again, and found that alot of the tools were freeware and very handy. Handy in both recovery of HD/System, Diagnostics of HD/System, and some cool Malware/Virus tool. By all means check out UBCD and judge for yourself...got a thumbs up from me. I will try and get some screenshots and do a walk through of this article to help some folks out...when time permits of course. Thanks Peeps!