My six month old HP needs a new hard drive (it started to roll up its turbines and launch yesterday morning). HP has one in the mail to me with a bunch of start up disks. Apparently I get the honors of swapping this thing out.

Good thing I bought a couple external hard drives.

So I’m wondering what all I should back up that I may have missed before making the swap? I am using a Seagate 750 gig drive with the backup software it comes with, and a second 250 gig HP personal drive. I “believe” my entire hard drive is backed up, but I’m not feeling all warm and fuzzy yet.

How can I make sure that my programs that were downloaded get reinstalled correctly? Lightroom for one, Turbo Cad Pro for another. These two programs are quite dear to me and it took me a lot of effort setting them up.

Any tips / words of wisdom? Luck and prayer is cool too……

break a leg?

If your drive is still functional, I'd recommend a program like Acronis True Image. It has lots of options, but 2 of them are drive cloning and backing up a complete drive to single compressed file. You can also create a bootable CD and use all of its features. My 2 pennies!

Mike, I've recently been adding a prayer at Mass for the good health of your 3808; apparently I should do one for your computer as well.

Spoilers advice is good. However, you want to make sure that you have not already destroyed or corrupted data within your operating system or programs. Otherwise you will just be backing up all of the corruption and that corruption could lead to further data breakdown on your new drive.

Personally, I only back up my actual user data. That is all my word docs, spreadsheets etc. my pictures, music, and anything else that can't be replaced from a program disk. I reinstall my operating system and all of my programs from scratch.

Another reason I go the long route and reinstall everything is because that over time, your hard drive gets fragmented, your registry grows to insane sizes with stuff you installed, deinstalled but it never quiet gets cleaned out fully. You will just be transferring all of these things that make your whole system run slower. Even if you defrag regularly, it never gets back to as good as it gets with a clean reinstall.

Backing up a particularly hard to install program or one that takes forever to customize back to where you like it, is an option. But if it writes stuff to the registry, then you are forced to back up the OS along with it or you will have to reinstall it anyways. Most programs write to the registry.

I have one game that is HUGE, hard to customize, and actually does not rely on writing to the registry. This is the only item for which I maintain a backup of this on a separate drive in case the first crashes.

I know it's more work, but I bet if you reinstall everything, you will find your PC works a lot faster. If you hardly ever use your PC, this might not be an issue but if you are like me and you are constantly adding & deleting programs and data, wiping it clean once every year actually is almost required, hardware failure or not, to keep it running at it's top speed.

I should add, pro actively keeping a regular backup of EVERYTHING while it is '"still fully functional" as Spoiler mentioned, is a great practice. I've been using computers since before hard drives were commonly available in a consumer model and I have only had one full catastrophic failure where I wished I had practiced what I preached. This year actually, and at least I had my personal data backed up.

The new hard drive and recovery disks showed up this morning. I installed the new hard drive, turned the PC on and was welcomed with the same noise as before that inspired my call to HP tech.

I checked both fans and neither is causing this noise. It sounds sorta like a rotational vibration induced noise and I can’t find the source. Two hours on the phone to HP and they want to send me a box for me to return the PC to them to for repair.

Is there anything else in this PC that can be a noise source? It an HP Pavilion a1767c.

DVD drive? That's about all. I'm kind of surprised your computer only has 2 fans, though. 1 case fan, 1 cpu fan?

There's also the power supply fan, and if you have a separate video card, that's likely to have a small fan on it as well.

I second the DVD drive, I sometimes hear a loud whirring noise from mine.

I unplugged the DVD drive, no bannana.

If I put light pressure on the both the case and CPU fan, just enough to cause it to stop spinning, the noise is still there. I'm baffled. Is there a fan inside the CPU? It's an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor.

If I tip the PC up and lightly tap the back end on the desk, the noise changes pitch and then resumes.

Sounds like it's probably the power supply fan. Unless there's a front case fan, that's probably the only other one.

Just tried that one too. I stuck a platic straw in the power supply to stop the fan. It didn't stop the noise. This is driving me nuts!! I have tried putting pressure on every board, every cable and it still makes the noise.

I think I better stop screwing with this thing before my mechanic trouble shooting practices kill it for good.

Are you sure your power supply has only one fan? Seems like I had one with two before, and I didn't even know the second one was there for a long time.

Not a little chipset fan, is there? (I'm sure you would have seen it, but I'm trying to cover all the bases here.)

Also, any hamster wheels?

Sounds like the noise must be generated by either a fan or a motor. Do you have a separate video card with a fan that's making noise? I've had trouble with my last two vid cards and fan noise.

You said in your 1st post that you're using two hard drives. Have you tried booting to just the startup screen with both hard drive's power disconnected? No harm would be done, and you would at least eliminate your drives as the issue.

And no, there are no other fans in the CPU other than heat sink fan you've already tried, so it's not the CPU.

That's it!!! There's an itsi-bitsi fan on the video card...

Cool. Now I don't have to screw with formating the new hard drive.

How hard would it be to hook up the new hard drive and use it as some sort of back up? I'm not seeing another set of wires to hook it up in there.

You have to look on the motherboard for another place to hook up another set of wires. Follow the set back from your HD down to the board and right near it there is usually another connector, if there is you will just need to get the cable.

What I've done when is just disconnect the dvd drive and use those connections with the hd temporarily sitting in the case somewhere. I'm no expert and the it guys will probably cry foul when they read this, but it's worked for me. I always keep a spare drive in a drawer with fully tweaked OS and programs so if I have a problem I'm only 5 min. away from being back running again.

Nope, that's cool. It's the same bus, so whatever you want to do!

Two hours on the phone with HP again. The guy didn't speak English very well. Two hours to convince him it was the video card.... I suspect they read off cook books, because this guy was an idiot.

They're OK sending me a hard drive to change, but now they want me to send the PC into them to swap out the card. I can't believe this.... I was half tempted to just buy one and not deal with HP till I saw how much the thing cost.

It looks as if there is a cable that has another conector on it for the second HD. I just need to buy two cables. Where's a good place to find them?

Oh, and thanks for the help fellas.