DescentBB

My current system, which I'll be replacing probably in the next year or so, has an SSD as the C drive and two other conventional hard drives. I'm getting some inklings that one of the data drive hard disks is reaching the end of its lifespan (CrystalDiskInfo). So I bought a (larger capacity) replacement drive; I plan to put the original drive (1.5 TB) into an enclosure and put the new drive (4 TB) into the desktop and then just copy the data over to the new drive. This is all still Win7 btw.

So, am I missing anything? Should I run anything on the old drive (I think it has a bad sector or two) before I try any of this? I wanted to run a chkdsk on the old drive but I'm still trying to figure out why its not running.

Yes, I have toodled around on Google on this a bit, but I am also old and not as patient as I used to be.

concentrate on getting the data off ASAP. one or two bad sectors isn't bad, provided they are not multiplying.

Power off the drive until you are ready to do the copy, and when you do start it wouldn't hurt to keep a fan on it while it is working.

I'd suggest using robocopy or some other copy utility that is a bit more reliable and error tolerant than dragging and dropping in windows explorer. Do the whole copy before you start worrying about running chkdsk (or really anything that potentially writes to the drive). Hard disks tend to fail "gracefully" but it is best to work quickly and not let it run for a long time when you know one is going out.

I had a old seagate 3TB drive, one of the well known ones that fail and like clockwork a couple months after its warranty expired it started reallocating sectors. I shut it down right away and bought a replacement, when the replacement came in I powered them both on and started robocopying the whole drive letter to the new drive. It completed the whole copy and about 10 minutes later as I did a sanity check on the copy the failing drive started corrupting parts of its file system. I got all the data off safely, but it was close.

Thanks.

So robocopy is this thing, huh?
https://adamtheautomator.com/robocopy/

I'm no expert, but not a total noob either, and I don't remember anything about robocopy. Sounds like a better approach.

The two current 1.5 TB drives pretty much have the same data on them - I use them as duplicate backups. I have accumulated a couple other bits and bobs on the drive that's maybe failing, so I may already be covered there. oh, and yeah the "bad" drive also has my default download location so there's that.

EDIT - Lawdy, Lawdy, I went back and looked at the documentation I had for this pc build and it was from way back in late 2012. Think I've gotten my moneys worth outta these drives.

EDIT 2 - boy it DOES take some time to format this larger hard drives.

Bonus question from me. My original ssd for this system was 128GB (Samsung MZ-7PC128D). Would I get much of a boost out of imaging the ssd c drive and replacing it with say a 1TB Samsung 870 EVO Series (only about $100)?

Or should I just wait since I really need to do a complete new build with Win 11? This is mostly an issue for me because I've been having performance issues with Lightroom (yeah, I know) which the new data drive may be good enough to get me over the hump until the new box is up and running.

If you aren't running out of space (128 is pretty small), then probably not a big difference. The drive you have is an 830 series which isn't super new but is still "modern", and while 128 GB drives are some of the slowest SSDs it is still light years ahead of a mechanical drive. But a 1 TB drive will accelerate anything you put on it compared to having it on a mechanical drive and it could be well worth the $100 and you can keep it for your next system build.

Data copy project completed. I put the new 4TB drive in an enclosure, formatted it, then did a robocopy of the potentially failing 1.5 TB internal drive to the new 4TB drive. Took a while but went mostly smoothly - got hung up towards (what I presume was) the end of the robocopy with an Error 5; \System Volume Information\Tracking.log Access is denied. I crtl-C'd out of that and both drives now contain the same amount of used space at 1.08 TB.

However, it looks like the old drive contents are still about 422 MB larger than what was copied to the new drive. Can you recommend a tool or tools that can compare the contents of the two drives to see what is different - there seem to be a number of freeware options available.

Part of the difference, it seems, is that the old drive contains "a mystery folder"; it displays no file contents in File Explorer (says the folder is empty), but the folder Properties says it contains 38 folders and about 300MB. Folders are set not to show hidden files. Googled around and saw that malware was suggested as a possibility; ran a HouseCall scan online and found nothing. I don't think I care about this folder except for the fact that I can't explain its weird behavior, which annoys me.

Incidentally, the same folder is also on my second 1.5 TB drive, but is only about 40MB in size with no files displaying.

Anyways for grins after the robocopy I ran error checking on the "bad" 1.5 TB drive. It says it fixed a few things, but whatever. I plan now to shutdown, pull the "bad" drive and swap in the new 4 TB drive that I robocopied the data to and then move on to the next thing. Thanks for your help and suggestions.

You can ignore \System Volume Information\, Windows keeps non critical stuff there (shadow copies, alternate versions of files, search indexes, backups, etc). It can add up to some significant space usage but in the event of a drive running low on space windows would delete most of it automatically. Even disk cloning programs ignore it.

The reason you cannot access it or see its contents is because of file permissions, typically it is locked down and only accessible by the "system" account. You can take ownership of it and everything within it to see the contents but doing so can lead to unpredictable behavior in windows so I would just ignore it. You can also use disk cleanup to purge most or all of its contents without ever needing to look at them.

The mystery folder I have that won't show the file contents is called "Win7 Stuff". I may have created this folder - but maybe not.

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/take-ownership-windows-8

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/take ... e-explorer

https://www.howtogeek.com/301768/how-to ... n-windows/

Interesting. Haven't drilled into this before.

However, it seems I have read and execute permissions on the "Win7 Stuff" folder, but still can't see what's in the folder. When I tried to add a permission for that I got this -
[oh buggers -can't remember how to post an image]
one window said
Setting security information on:
\\Win7 Stuff\Temporary Internet Files ...\9bunch of numbers).png

and the next one said
Error Applying Security
An error occurred while applying security information to:
\\ Win7 Stuff\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5...\home[1]
Access is denied.

So I just removed that permission and went back to what I had. So this sounds like something to do with temporary internet files? I think I must need to go throw some crap away on these disks.

Which should surprise no one. I've been a very lazy, untidy boy.

Well this is interesting. I installed WinMerge to do some folder comparisons between the old and the new drives after the robocopy.

When I put the two Win7 Stuff folders in on my two existing 1.5 TB drives and compare them, it does display that it is scrolling through a list of files, all of them in \Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\ and then most of them with png, ico and other extensions. This all looks like a bunch of garbage the system has been accumulating. I think I just need to throw out this trash.

EDIT - yeah, looks like old browser cache. What the hell is it doing there I wonder; wouldn't it just hang out on the C: drive?

Perhaps some time ago you intended to move your internet cache/settings from a previous OS/machine to a new OS/machine and dumped them to the drive, it would explain the permissions issues and all that.

Could be. Wouldn't be the first time I got started on some, came back much later, and had little or no memory of what I had wanted to do.

There's always something else, y'know!

OK, so I pulled the "bad" 1.5 TB drive and swapped in the new 4 TB drive that I robocopied the data to. Good so far. So i went into disk management to reassign the drive letter (that went fine) but the new drive is now listed as "Disk 2". Is that a problem that I need to fix?

Nope.

Cool. Thanks.