How should I sort this mess out

demonix00 · September 10, 2017

Just over two hours ago, I experienced my first hard drive failure when the western digital hard drive that contains the OS on the refurbished PC I purchased over a year ago suddenly went haywire and blue screened with it constantly going into BIOS because it had suddenly gone bad in its SMART (it suddenly had over 500 bad sectors) data and even if I turn off SMART in the UEFI BIOS the drive would stop working after a while and all I ended up with was a black screen even though the OS had booted.

I did at least have a backup system that I'm using now, but the issue is that I can't game because the only gaming capable system I have now had a bad boot hard drive, and even though I could attempt a clone, I couldn't be sure if it would even complete and recovering some of the data might also be impossible (although I could try a linux live DVD and see if I can copy some of the files to the other hard drive in the system) and I'm not sure if getting another hard drive and installing windows 8.1 would work since I'm not sure if the product key was hard coded into the motherboards UEFI BIOS since even though it shows the manufacturers branding when it is starting up I don't know if it extends beyond that.

Now the issue is that while the hard drive has died, I have a nearly comparable system that does work but can use the parts (that being the RAM, power supply, 2TB hard drive and the 1050Ti) to get it into gaming spec without any extra costs (since I don't think that the PSU in the dell would have enough juice to power the 1050Ti) and I can just keep the other system in backup until I can get the a replacement hard drive for it (I might try to reinstall windows 8.1 but I might just go straight to windows 10 instead) although there's the issue of getting all the games installed on the 2TB to gel with the new system (and I'm not sure it can be done quickly with the likes of origin and GoG Galaxy along with the standard online games that I have installed on it, although I'm guessing that with steam all I have to do is to point it to the directory that everything is installed in and go through the install process to get it to discover the files of each of the games).

Now that I've bored you to death with that wall of text, should I just move parts to the working system or should just go out and get another hard drive to see if I can salvage the OS on the failing hard drive.

Also, if this shouldn't be here then it can be moved to the correct section since I didn't think that this would be covered in any of the other general hardware related sections.