I take note for the recovery ;)
I'm currently using my old laptop and connected the old HD with the external case, and backing up things to another external drive.
I haven't bought the new harddrive yet, I wanted to go step by step, because a lot of things are new to me, to be able to focus as much as possible on each step, to see how things turns out, and to see if the store I bought the case in is trustworthy (I'm awaiting to see their reaction to the issue I have with the external case). There are chances I'll buy the new harddrive online : it's currently on sale and very cheap compared to the price my local store announced to me : for a WD of 2To, they announce 107€, I saw one on sale online [url=https://www.rueducommerce.fr/produit/western-digital-wd-blue-2-to-24222992#moid:MO-85ACFM58250338]at 65€[/url]. The difference is huge :S

Well, in the windows part, where I'm really annoyed to find some data is for PaleMoon, my web browser. I would like to save at least my bookmarks, and don't know how because I can't launch it to use the appropriate plugin (FEBE) :/
But I know where are the other things I want to backup : it's almost well organized ;)

Question :
The old harddrive is becoming hot, even through the metallic case : I guess it's normal and doesn't seems dangerous for now. But should I "take everything and run" (even during the night ?), or shut it down regularly to let it cool down a little and begin again later ?
By the way, some few times, I clearly hear a quick "tick".
Oh, and I'm becoming paranoid, but my little new external drive of 2.5" : I guess it's normal to hear a little the reading head while it's copying files into ? [please don't tell me I should worry about it]
Well, I was asking for my situation where I don't have windows installed ;)
I already use speccy, but thanks for the suggestions :) Unless... this softwares can be used in a newly installed windows to detect hardware ? Could that work if drivers aren't installed ?

Yeah it helps if you know already beforehand what hardware components your PC has, so you can google for the right drivers.

Usually the only drivers I need to and want to install after a clean Windows installation are:

1. Graphics drivers (GPU).
2. The WLAN (wifi) adapter drivers, in case the default ones from Windows don't wprk. This is not needed if it is a desktop PC connected with aneth cable.

For instance now that I clean installed Windows 10 on that Acer laptop, wifi internet worked fine with the default drivers so I just checked from the Windows device manager which GPU(s) it has (it has two, Intel HD 620 and NVidia Geforce GTX 950M), and went to Intel's and NVidia's homepages to download their newest drivers (for NVidia I actually installed their NVidia Experience utility that takes care of the driver installation).

The only hiccup was that the Intel HD 620 driver wouldn't install first because it said this laptop is using a vendor-specific 620 drivers (from Acer), but to overcome that, I just needed to first uninstall the Acer 620 GPU drivers, and then install the vanilla Intel 620 drivers..

Back when I clean installed Windows 7 on that one laptop, the problem was that wifi didn't work, so I didn't have internet connectivity at all. Vanilla Windows 7 didn't apparently have suitable drivers for that particular wifi adaprter that that laptop had (it was some "EMachines" laptop).

So what I had to do in that case was to go to another PC, google for the technical specifications of that particular laptop model to find out what wifi adapter it had, and then google for drivers for it. Then i installed them manually on that laptop and wifi internet worked fine again.

I just mentioned this in case Windows 7 doesn't have suitable wifi drivers for you either...

Re: drivers

Not sure what others have to say about it, but I've had really good results using Slimdrivers on multiple PCs. https://www.slimwareutilities.com/slimdrivers.php

Install it and let it do its thing. It'll take a look at your hardware, then check to see if you have the latest drivers. It won't do anything permanent without prompting you first: it gives you a list of available drivers and you choose which you want to install. And it asks if you want to make a Restore Point first, which is helpful.

First time around it may come up with a big list of updates. Note, though, that a bunch of them will be handled with a single update. For example, it may list something for a storage controller, but it's likely a chipset driver update that will also take care of your network hardware, sound, and integrated GPU drivers all in one shot.

Anyway, it has worked well for me: on three laptops, a desktop, and a NUC, Win7 and Win10. Worth a shot unless other folks give it a resounding NO vote.

For a little bit extra you could get a [url=https://www.rueducommerce.fr/produit/western-digital-wd-blue-4-to-24844204#moid:MO-6C50FM60081724]https://www.rueducommerce.fr/produit/western-digital-wd-blue-4-to-24844204#moid:MO-6C50FM60081724[/url]

Speccy should work on a windows without drivers. Read here how to search for the correct drivers.

For Pale moon you should find where its setting are located (probably here c:\Users\*your username*\AppData\Roaming\Moonchild Productions\Pale Moon\ or here c:\Users\*your username*\AppData\Local\Moonchild Productions\Pale Moon\palemoon\) and search for a bookmarkbackups folder. It should have some files like this bookmarks-2017-08-03_675_+Xmw7TDEl9nyte9dgkCk7g==.jsonlz4 . Save those and maybe the key3.db file too.

I'm not sure what's the best approach here, it depends how hot the drive is. The ideal temperature for HDD is between 25°C and 40°C. You can try and put some fan to blow some air over it. If you take a break, leave it to cool properly. Powering on and off mechanical components for short periods of time is never a good thing - it just causes the metals to dilate and contract more often.

It's normal for hard drives to make a specific sound when they read/write something. Even when you are not doing anything at the computer, Windows and other programs (antivirus for example) access the drive frequently for writing logs, defragging and other things.

I don't use wifi at all, but thanks for the tips, that could always be usefull :)
Nvidia drivers aren't what's worrying me the most (except concerning game compatibility... I was using an old version who was working perfectly with all my Good old Games, I hope I'll find the number of this version, or that the latest one is still old games friendly...), and I know how to deal with (I think).
It's more the very "specific" drivers who worries me : for sound, processor, anything else. Because I never dealt with them, and know things can be complicated. Buuut maybe I'll have luck and my dvd full of drivers will be enough :)
Thanks again for sharing your experiences & thoughts :)

Sounds really interesting :) I always heard (very) bad things about this kind of utilities. It may be usefull :) (if everyone thinks it's interesting) Thanks !

Well, it more than double the price :P And so for that price, I would prefer to take 2 drives of 2To, to be more safe ;) Unfortunately, my budget is really very limited, but thanks for the suggestion :)

This change a lot of things ! I'm already a bit less scared :) And thanks for the link, it sounds very useful !
Thank you ! :D I just asked on the PM forum and Moonchild was already beginning to help me :P That's nice and heartwarming to see people helping :) I'm copying the files right now !
I'm dumb, I have speccy XD hum, 51°C for my dying harddrive :S and 44°C for my new little drive ! But it seems it's not "too much" for the new one. For the old one.. well, what to expect from a drive who is always working at 100% and copying files. I only hope it will permit me to do everything I want.
I'll avoid the fan during whole night, I have neighbors and a very badly soundproofed flat ;) But tomorrow, very certainly !
That's what I was thinking, if what I'm copying ends before I go to sleep, I'll stop it until tomorrow. But I'm not sure it will : it's slow.
I was a bit afraid because it's new, and.. I wouldn't like to backup everything on a drive who is in bad health too XD So it's normal to hear it sometimes a bit, ok !
Thanks again for all your help ! :D

The new one is a bit hot. What brand and model is it?
After copying some big files I have the drive inside the laptop at 35°C and an external one (WD My Passport Ultra - previous generation) at 37°C. And the room temp is probably 26-27°C.

It's a Maxtor, 2,5", 4To . But I seem to have the same temperature than the hardrive of my laptop : 43°C (Room temp is almost 25°C). Maybe it's normal ?
All of this is a bit too much stressful for my taste, I hope this new drive didn't have any issue :/
Edit : I'm going to sleep for now, and my drives too. The copy went slowly but seems ok. Tomorrow I'll try to do a big backup day ! I still have a lot of things to backup :P

Maybe it is for these drives. Other Maxtor owners should chime in. When you have time maybe check the temps with other progs. I used HWiNFO. :)

So most probably nothing alarming, nice. Because I was a bit afraid of hearing a bit the head of reading, and with temp... Paranoia is a bit close :P
Okay, I personally used speccy, maybe they'll show different values ! I'll try Hwinfo later ;)

Files on any HDD are very rarely written contiguously, from start to finish, on successive sectors. Usually, they are split, according to the free sectors available. So if you try to copy/access a very specific file, such as the PaleMoon bookmarks, the actuator arm will have to jump from sector to sector, in order to read the complete file.

Clonezilla doesn't care about individual files. It will literally read the first sector on the disk, then move to the second, third and so on, until it reaches the last sector. All in one go, thus causing much less wear on your dying disk.

The cloning process will just create a .iso image file. If there were bad sectors on the dying disk, they will only be marked as bad sectors in the image file, but it will in no way affect the safe disk on which Clonezilla is writing the image file.

In my opinion, no need to touch them unless something doesn't work at all. As said, I usually manually install only GPU (graphics) drivers on top of what the vanilla Windows installs, and that's that. On that one eMachines laptop I also had to install wifi drivers, vanilla Windows 7 didn't apparently have suitable drivers for its wifi adapter.

I recall sometime also hunting for Windows 7 USB 3.0 drivers for my ASUS laptop because I was having some reliability issues with USB 3.0 external hard drives (they'd just be disconnected when in use), but later even that didn't seem to be necessary anymore.


Butting in...

I might try that, but as I mentioned, I usually don't manually update any other drivers than GPU graphics drivers, and let other drivers remain on what Windows installs. So far it has worked fine for me, everything works. I recall sometimes Windows Update itself might want to update some drivers, in which case I let it fo its stuff.

Have you seen some specific benefits running such overall driver update on everything? Better performance, or just more reliable?

I guess I usually think "if it isn't broken, don't fix it", but GPU drivers I try to keep up to date because at least in the past new NVidia Geforce drivers gave quite a big performance increase (10-20% or something like that), and once with Intel HD GPU a driver update magically made many older games work great, e.g. Empire Earth (which before that was unplayable due to graphical glitches on Intel HD Graphics).

Sounds very interesting too. I'll certainly try this one and the slimwareutilities if I need to find drivers, thanks for the heads up !

I understand a lot more how much it's useful ! But... The partition I want to backup is very big : 900Go of data to save. I'm afraid of the very long time it would take if it tries to do EVERYTHING in one run: what happens if it can't goes until the end the process ? (for example the harddrive shut down itself)(or even die ?) The iso will be broken & useless?
I'm currently backing up datas, and it says speed of a bit more than 4Mo/s, which is really nice if the disk is really dying. No ?

I remember I saw an article on the web who talked about driver update utilities who basically said "as long that it works, don't bother too much with drivers" (it was here but I don't know how much trustworthy it is). But I think that some good exceptions of this kind of softwares may happens, so maybe I'll try one of the driver utility software suggested by our pals here even if I don't "need" to : with a clean install I won't risk a lot and I will do a strong antivirus/malware scan after to see if anything is suspicious is there (but I want to specify that I'm trusting our two pals :)). I'll see what happens, I still have to purchase the harddrive.

Maybe I was having this issue on my PC : I remember one external harddrive who was simply stopping working when plugged in if you tried to move some "big" files. But there wasn't any issue on another comp'. Probably a driver issue ? (I remember I was plugging it on a usb 3 port)(but on this same comp', I didn't encountered issues with other usb 3 external harddrive).
I'm curious too :)
That sound worth enough to take a look, even if now I'm mainly thinking too the same way : as long as it works, avoid any unnecessary manipulation.