Desktop acting up, HDD might be ****ed, or something

[Jace]

As a bit of a protip (especially if you're skint/stingy), I recently bought a second-hand 2TB external drive for €63 including postage. As an external drive it was ****e and horrid, but I just took it out of the casing and installed as an internal drive. Now it's working flawlessly with a ton of partitions. Budget capacity!

 

[Ambalon]

Oh, that's an interesting alternative.

It all points out to being an imminent HDD failure. Anything else I should/can check to be the actual problem before spending money?

 

[Jace]

Depends how far you want to go. You could look up all sorts of HDD scanners and tests and throw 'em at it. Another option is to burn a boot cd and use the diagnostics on that. This means that the HDD won't be in use for the OS while the tests are running. Might get better feedback that way. You should be able to make a USB stick with that on it bootable as well, if you lack cd drive or burnable discs.

 

[Ambalon]

Ayy, we up and running on the new HDD. Everything in order, boot time is back to fast as usual.
Say, since my old HDD hasn't **** the bet (yet I chose not to connect it to the mobo in the meanwhile), if I want to retrieve some files from it all I have to do is plug it in and, on BIOS, sort it as second drive, right? Then I can access it through the new one and its OS.

 

[Splintert]

Yep. It'll show up as another drive D: or E: or something in windows explorer.

 

[Ambalon]

Great it's showing up, but I can't access the Users folder within it as I have no permission to, well, access it. D:
fug

 

[Splintert]

Hmm, might have to use some 3rd party explorer to bypass the Windows file permissions stuff. I don't know of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure someone here does.

 

[Jace]

If you're running on an admin account, I think you should be able to override those. Either right-click and change the permissions (not as straightforward as one would like to think), or somehow get Windows to ask for admin permission to access all that.

Something like this might make the whole shebang easier.

 

[Ambalon]

Yeah, I tried the right click thing but it didn't work. I got the "take ownership" prompt running, so... high hopes for that. Probably gonna take some time as I got a lot of **** on that folder.