That Was Easy.

Yesterday I ran a chkdsk and it took several hours (like 6) with many bad clusters repaired. I had my Darling Wife shut down the computer when it completed. Today I ran chkdsk again and it had an additional bad cluster after doing nothing all day. This is Very Bad.

The gparted/clonezilla plan failed because the old hard drive had (as gparted said) "hopelessly many" bad clusters. I remembered something I had read and checked . . . by "coincidence" (thanks Jesus) both the drives I was trying to use were Western Digital. I downloaded Acronis True Image (Western Digital edition) from Western Digital. I read the manual. I pushed a few buttons. In the morning I swapped the drives out.

If I had $40 or whatever I would say Acronis was worth it for an individual license. For a small company on a budget maybe a $$$$ license wouln't be, but zowie. That program Western Digital offers their customers is a 2009 version but it saved me huge headaches. Several drive manufacturers are offering house-brand versions of Acronis software to help customers migrate to a new drive.

I found it SUPER easy to use.