Not when it comes to hard drives…

My hard drive is running out of space! I was down to less than 10% free space on my drive, so I decided to put in a larger drive. I had done it before on 3 different computers… no problem.

Big problem. Started out easily enough… Trundled down to the computer store and bought a 500GB drive for just over $100. Took it home and then cloned the hard drive using Migrate Easy from Acronis. Took a while, but I had done it before, so I was ready for my new hard drive.

Swapped out the hard drives and started the computer and the next message was “Drive Read Error – Press ctrl-alt-del to restart”. Tried that – same result. Ran Migrate Easy again, same result.

Bad drive? It happens. Bought a new 250GB drive. Did it all again… “Drive Read Error” Getting frustrated now. Free space is dropping below 10%. Doesn’t appear to be a problem with the new drives.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch… My wife’s computer was low on drive space, so I took the 500GB and cloned that hard drive. Swapped the drives, and her computer booted up and was running with the new 500GB hard drive. (My drive I might add.)

Started a dialogue with Acronis support to try to figure out why they hated me… (I am sure they don’t hate me, but it felt like it.) Now I had successfully cloned new drives for 4 computers, but still had a problem with mine.

Time for Plan B. (I always have a Plan B, for when Plan A fails miserably, and if I don’t I make one up. Many times I am well into the alphabet before I get it right.)

Start moving files from my hard drive to an external hard drive.  But I know I have to be careful not to move any program files or I might lose functionality. So I was looking to move some data files. But since I do try to organize my data files in a reasonable directory structure to make it easy to find stuff when I want it, I had a lot of folders listed in Windows Explorer.

I am sure you notice how the Size column shows nothing for folders. So I went searching and found this plugin for “Folder Size”. How cool is this plugin. I could now see my folder sizes. This plugin allowed me to select folders and files to move to the external drive without having to use a calculator add up file sizes in each folder over multiple folders to figure out the size of the higher level folders. If you don’t have this plugin, you should consider adding it. It is very useful for seeing what is where on your drives.

Continuing the dialogue with Acronis to try to figure out why this computer doesn’t like the cloned drive. I will keep you updated.

Feels good to rant just a bit and work out some frustration.

Regards,

Jack