Getting a new hard drive due to my old hard drive having some bad sectors (possibly causing some freezing). It was time to get a new drive anyway. This one is over 4 years old and has lasted two different computers.

So my question is when i get the new drive or is there an easy way to image my current drive onto the new one, or should i re-install everything fresh. If so would the new drive need to be defraged (my current drive is 19% fragmented). First time i've even had more than one main drive.

New drive is a Western Digital Black 1TB 64mb cache 6gb Sata
Old Drive is a Western Digital Caviar SE 250gb 8mb cache 3gb Sata

Should i keep the old drive to store files, music, etc or just dump it?

you can get your hands on trueimage to clone.
or use the ubcd4win boot disk to clone the drives.
I think the hirens disk has cloning apps on it.

download the rial of trueimage home.
if the drive has a bunch of bad sectors you can tell it to ignore bad sectors and hope they aren't important enough to screw up the OS.

afterwards, dump the drive. only more bad sectors will happen and it will eventually fail and will take your data with it.

Ever thought about getting an SSD drive and perhaps using your old one for storage?

I'm running a 64gig SSD OCZ agility 3 drive at the moment and its pretty fast especially for the price £90

Failing that I dont know what these Hybrid drives are like but 500 gig ones aren't too expensive

So i downloaded a full copy of acronis from the Western Digital site. Worked like a charm. Cloned my old drive to the new one. after i made sure it was working i cleaned it up a bit (in terms of cables). Not sure i can tell the difference in the 6gb and 3gb but eh it's suppose to be better right. So far so good. We shall see if all goes well, only time will tell.

I'm exceedingly thankful to harryb for helping me so i didn't have to reinstall everything from scratch and basically holding a noob's hand.

@FinalDJ i have thought about ssd but chose to stick with what i know for now since i just needed something quick. My next drive will def be ssd though.

trueimage is great, I use it for most desktop or workstation cloning.
for important machines and servers, I use storagecraft.
It's faster cloning and virtualizing a image is easy since virtualbox and accepts the image naturally and vmware a conversion is needed.
but congrats and you're welcome. glad I could be of some help.

if you plan on using the old drive, get another drive and use trueimage to back it up to a image on the other new drive.
nothing hurts more than losing your shit and knowing you could've prevented it.*LOL*
trust me, I lost 300gb of music, fort minor, the roots, linkin park, hed kandi mixes to name a few.

so now I image all my server's drives and retire them after 2 years running and clone them to new drives.

ok so, so far so good. before i think i couldn't go more than an hour without the computer locking up. usually it was about 20-30min. been using the computer since around 8 or 9pm with no negative results. Crossing my fingers that things will stay good.

So i thought i was good, but i am not. Same freezing going on today... just started happening today... computer locked up twice in about a 3 hour period. Things locked up but i was able to use my mouse for about 3 seconds before it locked up for good. I am at a complete loss. No idea what i should do now.

Frustrating not having a stable system

okay, do you remember what was installed before the crashing?
have you tried removing one stick of ram or replacing? are all ram the same brand?
I had a desktop that all of a sudden started locking up, it ended up being the graphics card. it was a nvidia from msi and some of the capacitors had bulged and after replacing it with a new card mo more crashing.
is it crashing even when you aren't running any apps?

ok so i was checking some windows reliability report (didn't even know i could do that... windows 7 is awesome!) and found a BUNCH of these "Video Hardware Error"

Description
A problem with your video hardware caused Windows to stop working correctly.

Problem signature
Problem Event Name: LiveKernelEvent
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1033

Extra information about the problem
BCCode: 117
BCP1: FFFFFA800469B4E0
BCP2: FFFFF8800420740C
BCP3: 0000000000000000
BCP4: 0000000000000000
OS Version: 6_1_7601
Service Pack: 1_0
Product: 256_1

Update: Uninstalled old drivers completely and reinstalled... again. If this doesn't work i think i might just rma the video card

More Update: Froze again just now, gonna rma this sucker. Not sure if i just got unlucky in the card failing this soon (if that's even what it is), or if XFX just can't make a good card. Just sent in a support ticket to XFX. Waiting to hear back from them.

if this is a nvidia instead of using the xfx drivers, try the nvidia drivers from nvidia's site.I tried a few xfx videocards and just installed one for a client who needed dual monitors.

it's an ati/amd radeon hd5830 (got the drivers from the and/ati site). I'm thinking to get an evga nvdia mx460 then selling this one after i get it back.

try using a older version driver.
I'm assuming you used the driver supplied wth the card, and then you grabbed the latest drivers from the site. so try some of the ones in between.
I have a all in wonder from visiontek and the original drivers sucked on win7, and the latest one would bluescreen my pc.
the driver version beloe the latest works but once in a while using mediacenter it'll freeze.