Warning... your hard drive is failing....

That dreaded box popped up on me today....

I had a 128 solid state Corsair drive and it's on its last legs... I was dreading the whole process of re-loading windows yet again for the umpteenth time so I decided to to it differently.

A little research led me to download Macrium. I then made an image of the drive and saved that to my external hard drive... ran to Best Buy and grabbed a $69 Seagate 1T drive.... came home popped out the old solid state and put in the new drive...

Booted the PC and the Macrium restore screen came up.... selected to restore the image to the new drive... it took all of 5 minutes and viola... everything is just like it was before.... I can't believe how easy this actually was....things have definitely changed for the better when it comes to replacing hard drives....

Now I have just 1 question..... my file explorer still shows C: as 128 instead of 1T... not a big problem as I install all programs on my external drive anyways... but I was wondering if there is a way to get it to show the correct amount of space?

probably you'll need to use the disk management tool to extend the partition

a reply to: RickinVa

I've used Macrium for a long time - glad you found it.

You need to go into Disk Management and expand the volume. =]

a reply to: RickinVa

Your other option, which may be a better one, would be to create a new volume in the unused disk space.. Make it your D drive (or whatever you want)

Install games, apps, storage, etc, to that drive. This will be beneficial in the future if you decide to get another SSD. It's easier to clone a smaller volume than a large one. This way you can keep your OS installed on the C drive and you can later clone it back to a 128g or slightly larger drive without having to worry about shrinking the volume later.

a reply to: TinkerHaus

I went with the new volume.... when I have a little more cash I most likely will go back to a new solid state.

Thanks for the help.


EDIT: I am officially done with anything made by Corsair.... first I had Corsair memory go bad back a few years ago... I have had 2 Corsair power supplies die within 2 months of installation ( different pcs) and now the Corsair solid state which lasted about 18 months.

originally posted by: TinkerHaus
a reply to: RickinVa

Your other option, which may be a better one, would be to create a new volume in the unused disk space.. Make it your D drive (or whatever you want)

Install games, apps, storage, etc, to that drive. This will be beneficial in the future if you decide to get another SSD. It's easier to clone a smaller volume than a large one. This way you can keep your OS installed on the C drive and you can later clone it back to a 128g or slightly larger drive without having to worry about shrinking the volume later.

Correct answer. Unless the new drive was set up as a dynamic disk , disk manager will not extend the volume. You can only partition and use the new space as another logical drive D:

originally posted by: RickinVa
a reply to: TinkerHaus

I went with the new volume.... when I have a little more cash I most likely will go back to a new solid state.

Thanks for the help.


EDIT: I am officially done with anything made by Corsair.... first I had Corsair memory go bad back a few years ago... I have had 2 Corsair power supplies die within 2 months of installation ( different pcs) and now the Corsair solid state which lasted about 18 months.

Samsung makes the best ssd right now, and top notch quality. Samsung Evo Pro

Glad you were able to get restored and thanks for the tip about Macrium. Scary how dependent on computers we are.
My first SSD was made by Crucial. It was terrible and died within 30 days. I was on a tight budget and newegg ran a sale so my next SSD was Samsung, which is still doing great. My next one will likely be OCZ. At the risk of stating the obvious, every SSD is not the same. Check out the benchmarks and reviews on some of the top tech sites. Anandtech is one of my favorites.

It's scary to hear about SSD's failing. I always figured they would have a MUCH longer life than the traditional mechanical drive for a number of obvious reasons. But it seems that flash memory can't handle being constantly written to over and over and that is what happens with the HDD in your computer even when it's idle and not in sleep mode or turned off. Always indexing, always swapping files, always auto defragging.

I've had an SSD in my computer for a few years now and it's still kicking just fine.

I second the distaste for Corsair.
Samsung is good.
ADATA is good.