On Mon, 26 May 2014 17:37:55 +0000 (UTC), Calia
wrote:

On Mon, 26 May 2014 09:40:34 -0400, Wolf K wrote:

your _first_ concern should be to get all your
data off the disk drive

This is good advice, as had been all the prior advice.

I am heading down to Radio Shack today, if they're open, to pick
up an SATA/ATA USB adapter, which will make it very easy to get
all the data off the hard disk drive.

I've done that step before, and, even better, I recently
made a backup of my data hierarchy only about a month
ago, so there really isn't much data that I need to
back up incrementally anyway.

That probably will work, especially since the drive is not failing and
there's little risk of losing anything on it.

In the future, you might consider doing an image backup instead. I
use Acronis True Image 2014, but there are free drive cloning programs
that will also work:
http://clonezilla.org
Some of the benefits of image backups a
- Speed. I just did an SSD to USB 3.0 backup running at 6
GBytes/minute. Typcial for older machines and USB 2.0 is 1-2
GBytes/minute backup.
- It backups up literally everything. Nothing is missed. That's
great for programs the dump files in unusual places or strange stuff
in hidden partitions. Also works with UEFI boot.
- In this case, it will also get the recovery partition, which you
might need for a reinstall. The alternative is to order the recovery
DVD's from HP (about $30).
- etc...

I'm at the point that everything that is brought to the shop usually
gets backed up twice; once on arrival and once when it's done.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/crud/backup-drives.jpg
That's about 6TB of drives show. There is probably another 5TB of
drives that I've since the picture was taken. What makes this
practical is the speed of the backup (and restore).

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558