Whoo hoo! Replaced a dying hard drive

I have a Toshiba Satellite. It took longer and longer to boot, and I started getting ominous messages about not finding a hard drive. 

Part of my monthly maintenance is to use Paragon Backup and Recovery 12 Compact. I back it up to our home file server over the network. When the laptop finally did boot, I saved my financial files and some of my current school project; then I proceeded to do a full backup with Paragon. 

The time to finish the backup stayed around five hours, no matter how many hours of wall time passed. It was simply not moving forward. I asked Glary Utilities to do a check disk and boot defrag when it rebooted. Alas, it never rebooted. 

Now I had a 640 Gb 2.5" internal drive that was at death's door. I shopped at Newegg and Amazon and found a 1 TB Hybrid internal drive. The hybrid combines some Solid-State memory for part of its drive and uses a traditional disk for the remainder. The advantage is that the machine sleeps and wakes up quickly, since many of the operating system files reside on the SSD (Solid-State Drive) portion. 

So it wouldn't boot, but could the old drive be read? I placed the old drive and the new drive in a desktop, and then booted the desktop with a Linux-based tool called Clonezilla. 

Clonezilla recognized the old 640 Gb and the new 1 Tb drives. I went through the beginner's prompts to clone the disk; however, the request to perform a check disk on reboot blocked Clonezilla from doing its job. 

I had to drop into Clonezilla's command prompt mode and run a handy linux tool called fsck (file system consistency check). (And yes, the name lends itself to being used as a curse.) 

Then I ran Clonezilla in expert mode, told it to fix sectors as necessary. It cloned the disk in about two hours.

I replaced the drive in the laptop, and while it took a long time to boot the first time, it came up with all files in tact. (I was overjoyed to see it get all the way to my main screen.) I ran Glary utilities again with a hard disk check, and it found a few bad sectors, which it repaired.

Lessons learned

• I will keep doing the monthly backups. 
• I will record the time it takes to back up the drive.
• Lengthening time may indicate impending drive failure
• I need to burn a Paragon recovery CD.