I get some very very loud grinding noises from the hard disk of my PC. I understand that it may crash soon. To recover data (around 80 GB) 1 ) Do I do a hard disk to hard disk transfer using this as a slave disk in another system ? It could crash during the process.. Or 2) Do I need to get the hard disk opened and do something to prevent a Head crash? Thanks in advance
Do not open the hard disk. You will fuck it up! <- yes this is the technical term. Secondly you could consider buying an external USB hard drive to backup all your shit in case the hard disk goes for a toss.
Slaving it to another PC is one way, another is to connect to another PC via a cable or wireless network. Don't worry about the integrity of your OS, the files are nearly always readable and will copy just fine. Better still ,upgrade your machine with new drive/s, and slave your old disk. I am college trained (ITSST/A+) and I work in a small computer repair and consumables shop. Best drive on the market at the moment has to be Seagate barracudas, the only drive with a 5 year warranty! I would install a pair of Barracuda 10'000RPM 250Gb 16Mb cache SATA drives, in a striped RAID configuration. They would be formatted as one 500Gb drive. If you use you PC to compose music, you may be aware that there are some huge VST samples. My friend uses a pc that I built specifically for Cubase etc. One of his piano samples ( Steinway Baby Grand) is 41Gb. It has to be streamed off a very fast hard drive as it is needed. This is because XP will only address 3Gb of memory. Vista is a little better with 8Gb I think. When you upgrade you Mother board and processor you will already have a nice shiny pair of hard disks.
Compiler programming. I have tried VB and found it easier than expected. Compilers take out repetitive and boring act of typing command line, and you can start with the fun stuff of building a window interface, output displays and of course control buttons to click with your mouse pointer, Whoo Hoo. Imagination is an often overlooked prerequisite of writing programs, what do you want your program to do, that involves utilising a computer's power, such as running algorithms, boolean logic and accessing large data bases and processing it so to produce useful output?
forget buying new hard disk for such silly problem ! low noice from harddisk are alwaws present,b'cos there are rotating aprts in it and at a high speed (rpm). the data gets stored i your hdd in a random manner, ie. the data clusters are written apart. that's the reason, the reader head of hdd has to shift it's position quickly in order to access data and hance make noise. so all you need to do is DEFRAGMENTING !!!!
