How to Successfully Clone Your OS and All Programs from Failing Hard Drive

I've come across this question many time on various forums and blogs, where user wants to replace there bad or failing hard drive with another brand new hard drive of larger sizes but unsure on how they can safely move or copy OS and all the program files without loosing data.

So, I've decided to write this to the point article and let user know the safest way of moving OS from bad hard drive to new one without loosing any program or important files.

Disk Cloning is much powerful way which safely makes the exact replica of your bad hard drive without giving any booting failure. Keep in mind that you can't simply copy all the OS files to new hard drive and suppose it to works perfectly, instead it might gives you a series of error message as well as prevent you to access your desktop.

Cloning will easily copy the entire hard drive content i.e., entire OS folder, hidden files, directory structure as well as the booting information (required to boot OS) and place it in the new hard drive without needing you to install a fresh copy of Windows on your new hard drive.

Thereafter, you can easily replace the old hard drive and start using the new hard drive for storing your valuable data and running your OS.

Download disk cloning software, your first step?

Once you realized that the drive goes bad and you've left no choices other than replacing it, purchase a new hard drive of equal or larger size as compare to old one and attach it to your computer as a secondary or slave drive. We'll use this drive to place the cloned copy of old drive and later than, make it as master or bootable drive.

You'll need an efficient drive cloning tool for successfully cloning the drive. Stellar Phoenix Partition Recovery is a complete DIY and packed with  advanced features, which gives you a secure way to clone hard drive as well as an ability to recover partition as well as the containing data when anything goes wrong.

You can download this software from here and install it on your old hard drive. Once you install this software, start it from the desktop or programs menu.

Navigate to Advanced option screen of this software and click on an option entitled Drive Clone.

Select the source drive, which is your problem drive and destination disk would be your new externally attached storage device.

Once you’ve done with this can start cloning the drive. This may take some time depend on the size of the drive and number of available bad sectors and blocks which your hard drive has developed during the course of using it.

Once the cloning process completes, you can now easily replace the problem or bad drive with new drive and later, restore OS and all of your data from it.

Read More

Windows 7 taking Forever to Shutdown, Reasons and Solutions

Did Windows 7 taking long time then expected to shutdown? Or, just hang while saying "Windows is shutting down" whenever you wish to turn off the computer. Many were faced this and gets annoyed as sometimes, it can take up to 2 to 4 hours to completely turn off.

Definitely, bunch of installed programs in Windows 7 might cause this, as some programs comes with some sort of services which can't be stopped properly and lets your windows take forever to close. Moreover, few services starts automatically as soon as you start the system and continuously runs in the background making your system freeze or prevents you to perform desired operation.

If you've recently faced this and didn't come up with any working solution, this tutorial might helps you to find the right way of getting out of this error. Remember, stop directly pressing the power button to immediately turn the system off as it can make your system permanently inaccessible or sometimes damage the whole Windows.

Method 1:

• Press 'Window button + R' to open text box and type "regedit" without quotes.
• Navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControl" folder and locate the key at the very right Window entitled "WaitToKillServiceTimeout".

  
  

• Change its default value from 20000 to 5000 I.e. 5 seconds. Now the windows is set to wait maximum of 5 seconds for shutting down the service otherwise, Windows will forcibly stop the service and safely turn off the computer.
  Note: You can't reduce this value to lower than 5 seconds, so don't try to do that. 

  [Also Read: Hard Disk Failure Symptoms & Increase Hard Disk Life Span]

Method 2:

If you've Windows 7 running on LAN connections or any other type of networks, consider updating your network drivers and uninstall the old drivers. Network drivers is not responsible for long shutdown period in all cases but sometimes windows faces difficulties to send command to loose the network connections and as results, remains at the same shutdown screen for a long time.

Method 3:
Remove any externally connected device(s) like USB, flash drive, floppy drive etc. And then reboot the system. See if windows still throws the same error. Bad or failing hard drive could also cause this and so why, you're recommended to run hard drive or memory test, if this happens always whenever you choose to shut down your PC.

Method 4:

Try to run your system in safe mode or clean boot mode to come up with any faulty or outdated drivers. Once you find the driver, consider replacing it with an updated one or completely removing it from the system.

If you've sorted out this problem with another trick, don't forget to write it here in comment section.

Read More

Clone copy is ready to use hard drive for your Mac OS X

You would have wished for a ready-to-use backup copy in hand, on an account of a dead Mac OS X. Causes of OS X death could be countless including the logic-board failure, overheating, hard drive failure & grave logical corruptions. Like a human body, computers too will fall ill, hospitalized and treated for medication and & may eventually dies. Unlike a human body, computers can be backed up timely to reuse the information on other machines. All we need is to keep timely backups by our side, in fact backups should be ready to use. External hard drive these days are much of a help & can be used in 3 manners - 

1. Simple Copy & Paste data to/from hard drive
2. Time Machine
3. Clone Copy

The first method is a lay practice followed widely by most users but is inefficient in many cases. Only a part of hard drive minus the other volumes & system information is kept on the external hard drive. The moment Mac system crashes the user could only access the external hard drive backup files after a fresh installation of Mac OS X. Isn't tiresome job? Also, the user had to be active in copying the necessary file on daily basis so that most updated information is backed up. 

The lay practice is soon overcome by the use of Time-Machine & Time-Capsule which does the job on keeping the updated files without intervention of user on regular basis. To do this few time-machine settings are required or make your external hard drive a time capsule for your Mac which takes incremental backup. Upon a Mac crash, Time Capsule will make available all the necessary files updated to the most recent date. Although, the user have to fresh install a Mac again to access the capsule.  

Clone, on the other hand is a supplementary technique that ensures both back-up of the Mac hard drive as well as available source of booting a Mac that crashed. Clone is combination for backup & system restore. A dead OS X Mac can be brought to life within minutes if there exists a ready-to-use clone copy of your hard drive. 

1. Keep the Mac installation disk ready to start your Mac. Insert the disk into the DVD slot & press C.
2. Now, need to select the language which is 'English' in our case. This will navigates you to open disk utility through Menu<Utilities. 
3. View Restore tab in Disk Utility, mention source drive which is nothing but the Macintosh HD & destination drives which is an external hard drive.
4. Finally, press the mouse click on Restore tab.

This is an absolute free method to clone your boot drive/entire Mac hard drives. What if no installation disk is available with the user which is a most common case? You might not be able to clone your HD in this way & may hunt out for a clone utility.  

1. Connect external hard drive to Mac & launch any of the both application.
2. Navigate to the clone window where you can easily select & view source/destination drives. Once the hard drives are defined hit the 'CLONE' button to execute the process. 
3. If your purpose is to extract data from a bad hard drive (bad sectors) then chose Image over clone, which will image a hard drive with good sectors only. 
4. Else, navigate to tools to create a boot DVD & Minimal system disk that restores Mac back to life. 

Cloned copy can be used for other machines of same OS X version & even rules out different Mac models. However, Time Machine backups are not bootable; still they hold multiple variants of your files which a clone does not hold. Choice is yours whether to clone a hard drive or use it as time-capsule. Good for those who have many disks available & are backup concerned can implement one hard drive for TM & another for clone.

Read More