New toy (part 2)

So I got the hard drive cloned. Took another two hours after I made my last post on the subject, but it got there in the end. I took out the old drive, put the new one in as master, put my old slave back in as the slave, and switched on.

Boy, is it ever fast now! I had no idea that putting in a more up to date drive can make such a difference to the speed of the PC. It boots up faster than it's ever done before, programs start faster, everything is faster :-) As the new drive is a sector-for-sector copy of the old drive, the programs and files are still just as fragmented as they were before, but since the new drive is that much bigger than the old one, they're now squeezed into the first 10% of the disc and not spread all over the place. Maybe this will account for part of the increase in speed. Of course, the new drive spins faster, has a faster data transfer rate and has a bigger cache than the old drive, which is probably the main reason for the speed increase.

When HDClone was doing its business, it told me that I had about 250 bad sectors on the old drive. I've no idea if I've lost the data that was in these sectors, or even if there was data there to begin with, but all I know at the moment is that the programs I use all the time still work, and the programs I don't use often, well, I can reinstall them if I have to.

The next step is to copy all the data from the slave drive onto the new main drive, and reformat the slave drive to get rid of Linux. Wish me luck.