I have made a habit of running two drives in every computer I've ever built--a system/application drive, and a data drive. My current machine had an 18 G "C" drive and a 36 G "D" drive serving the two respective functions. Finally, my C drive ran out of room, and I need to install a major piece of software. So, my idea was move the data to a newer, bigger "D" drive (70 G) and "ghost" the C drive onto the old D drive to become the new system drive.

Unfortunately, when I got my new drive it came with a S.M.A.R.T. analysis tool, designed to predict the possible failure of drives. I had never used something like this before. Upon running the analysis, my old C drive and my new 70 G drive were fine, but the old D drive that I had hoped to metamorphosize into a bigger, better C drive failed the test. A repeat using someone else's analysis tool gave the same results.

Now, the S.M.A.R.T. analysis application sits in background like an old gypsy woman, and every so often flashes the warning that my D drive is DOOMED TO DIE! Now I gotta cough up for a brand new C drive too. It should arrive tomorrow. Both the new drives are Seagate Cheetahs.

Hopefully, the image copy process will work flawlessly, so I don't have to kill about a week reloading every damn application. Wish me luck...

Seagate has online disk analysis tools here. Try them out, and see what the old gypsy woman tells you...