Of course, then I had to reinstall Windows XP, all the games and software, patches, hacks and fixes, and customize and tweak everything so that it would be like it used to, lest I’d go crazy. The task was so daunting, however, that I just installed Windows, and let the then-new hard disk collect dust for a couple of months … till I stumbled upon HDClone.

HDClone lets you make identical copies of your hard disk for free. At least there’s a free, stripped-down version of it: you can only copy from small drives to a bigger ones (not the other way around) and SafeRescue and verifying mode is missing.

Copying everything (free version copies 0.3GB/min) took over four hours, but it was well worth it, because everything worked like I expected it to. Of course, you could argue that I should have formatted, because of all the junk that accumulates in Windows over time (I’ve had the same installation for about three years), but since I’ve had so few problems with it, and that it would take so long to reinstall everything, I decided I could easily live with it

By the way, Hitachi Deskstar hard disks are even more silent than Seagate Barracuda, so I can definitely recommend them if that sort of thing is important to you.