Yes, that will copy the sectors over there, but it won't handle the geometry issues that are certain to pop up gracefully.

I think parted magic will do that, but I haven't personally tried, so I'm not sure.

interesting, thankyou.

Do you have any links to explain the geometry issues? It's something I'm unaware of.

It's mostly a hold over from times of old. A disk would have Cylinders, Heads and Sectors, which do hit a max point. To go above that they had to create Logical Block Addressing, which is kind of complicated, but it involves lying about the physical geometry.

MBR format disks typically need to be aligned to the cylinder otherwise a lot of utilities have issues with them. GPT disks don't need that alignment and can generally handle being aligned by capacity.

And if you don't get that right, weird things can happen.

I think most disk cloning software should be able to handle it just fine, assuming you're using a common filesystem like NTFS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_cloning_software

Is the difference between MBR and GPT as stark as the difference between IDE and SATA I/O?

They're pretty completely dissimilar, but at this point it's almost certainly MBR, unless it's a Mac or a really huge disk. If you're running Win XP it's not even supported for the 32bit version. Most partitioning utilities should be able to tell you which it is.

Typically it's going to be MBR though.

EDIT: GPT is great where supported, but the support isn't necessarily good in all quarters at this time.

Without seeing the computer I can't say for sure, but in general it's a safe assumption that it would be MBR unless you knew otherwise.

I just got done cloning my main disk with clonezilla, and it boots up just fine, so it should work for you, providing you don't have too funky a set up.

I was able to move all loose files (appx. 400GB) to an external drive for the time being. To reduce strain, I placed a jumper on the "Limit to 1.5Gb/s operation" pins, and connected it to my machine via a SATA-to-USB adapter, so it doesn't draw any heat from inside the machine (setting it on top of an A/C vent helped too, I guess). AT ~17MB/s, the whole move took about six hours. I'm still waiting on the new internal drive, to which I will copy the partition of the old drive to the new one, using Partition Wizard, which seems to be my best option. I'll still run a full disk check afterwards to recover any bad or empty sectors the partition copy might have brought over.

Alright, I've finally got the new disk now, and am ready to initialize it so I can format it and start copying over from the old one. I want to initialize it as "MBR", right?

If you'ree using NTFS file system then yes.

I suppose I should be concerned as to why Windows didn't initialize it automatically in the first place. Probably because I removed it from my mobo's BIOS' "Boot Sequence Order" list. I think I misunderstood that to mean "This is the order in which I will try to boot your machine. If the first fails, then I'll move on to the next", and not "This is the order in which I will initialize each device when you turn on the power".

Turns out that since the new drive was a Western Digital drive (Caviar Black), I was entitled to use the WD-licensed version of Acronis True Drive to clone the old partition to the new drive. I'm currently doing a seven pass wipe of the old one, which is only 15% done after seventeen hours. I don't know if this is due to the state of the drive or the thoroughness of the DoD 5220.28-STD wiping method.

I'd be inclined to say both. Wiping large things takes lots of time, wiping large things seven times over takes longer. And of course, if the drive's on its way out, it won't be going at its maximum speed.

It looks like you are going to make it out of the tunnel safely without much lose. Let it be a warning and implement some sort of back up plan ASAP.

Way back in 1998 I remember the painful day of losing my windows install to some fluke incident.

Several years ago I really got serious with backing up my data and have used several ways to go about it.

I could lose this main drive right now and be back up and running in a few. Acronis could be a starter area for you. I used to use it for a bit till I moved on to something else.

In the end you will feel better knowing you have extra copies of your precious data elsewhere.

The wiping was taking to long. In the end I just said "Screw It" and disassembled it with a hammer. And then a drill press.

@darrel

I back up my data all the time. I don't need any "warnings". This issue was the fault of Seagate. It started when I noticed my drive was coming up with more any more "empty sectors" lately, and so I called a Seagate tech, who advised me to update the drive's firmware (I'd been using WD drives up until that time, and WD internal drives never had upgradeable firmware, though I'm aware that their external "Passport" drives do). After upgrading the firmware, and restarting the system, the BIOS at last detected that the drive was failing it's Reallocated Sectors Count, which is the worst test to fail.

So to sum up, a bad firmware version didn't detect an error until it was too late, which was the fault of the manufacturer.