Journal #8818

Try Macrium Reflect if you want to do it from Windows.
Or if you are more experienced boot up a live linux distro and use dd to clone the drive (be careful not to override your existing drive).

Oh you will need a usb to sata adapter or some other way to plug the second drive into the pc.

Extremely easy with acronis true image if, that is, your hard drive is still healthy (with out slow/no response sectors).

Some times drives click on their own when they realign their heads, or if they lost power for a fracture of a second. Check your hard disk power supply as well.

@Rufee: Will look that up. Also I have some old Mint DVDs lying around, they should do. You say it'll be better?

@Stojke: It works just fine. It just seems to be clicking relatively often and that worries me.

Connect a different power cable to it and observe will it continue happening.

It's a laptop. I don't have another power cable.

Missed that part
Do back it up definitely. Acronis can help you make an identical copy if you can access an desktop computer with two free sata ports.

I had one HDD die on me in my entire life, around 6 years ago. It still haunts me. Lost all my old maps :<

I did have a drive crash 9 years ago with no warning at all. I didn't mind most of what I lost but I did have to start over a group project I was really fond of. It turned out better than it was before the crash. As for the drive, I put it in a box forever hoping one day I'd be able to afford a data recovery service. A decade later, I'm not sure I want to invest in that that badly

But, considering right now I have plenty of stuff that is a lot more important than anything I had when I was 20, and much less free time, I should make sure it doesn't have to happen again.

@DiscoStu: Its just a way of doing it, the imaging will take less time since you wont be using the drive to run Windows while you are copying data to the new one. Both ways are fine

I've had one or two hdd's fail over the course of 16 years or something. Nothing significant was lost. Iv'e did more damage by accidentally formatting... twice. Oh how I wish I had known how to restore deleted partitions back then so from then I started keeping every old HDD Iv'e ever used. Got like 5 in the drawer + a couple of SSD's just in case I need some old files.

Now I got a Raid mirror array, but still working on setting up a proper backup solution.

Try using HDTune or some similar software to read its S.M.A.R.T. data, and also perform a scan of the disk.

When I bought an SSD for my laptop I used Samsung's Magician software, I'm not sure if it works exclusively with Samsung SSDs, but the point is that I clone the C:\ drive with Windows, and everything went smoothly.

What do I need the S.M.A.R.T. data for?

Does anybody have any particular suggestion for choosing a new drive? anything I should have? Anything I should avoid?