Cloning to new SSD from failing HDD

Paul, I'm not sure how to do what you're suggesting. The old HDD has 3 partitions, and while two of them cloned just fine (the bootable partition and the Recovery partition), the third one (representing C is the one that's failing. Are you saying that I should break it up in to separate partitions? If so, how do I do that?

You've probably already got the C drive partition structure on the SSD from your previous attempt. Simply go into your backup software and do a partition clone rather than a disk clone. Clone the C drive to the corresponding partition on the SSD, or to the space where the partition should reside. The partition boot sector may or may not line up as it should, so you'll probably have to use a WinRE disk to restore the boot, which it probably will do automatically.

You're BU software should also have the option to "align" the partitions on the SSD, otherwise you will suffer a major performance hit.

As for Quickbooks et al, you probably could get an override on the licensing problem through their support, unless the original license is "single image", in which case you're stuck with the current install unless you really know your way around the Registry.

edit: BTW, for the command line copy to work you would have to invoke the VSS service first. And even then I don't know that it would work. It would have to pick up hidden and system files. Better to stick with BU software, I think.

Thanks for all of the help! I was finally able to get it working today!

For the sake of future readers...

I had originally tried using Macrium Reflect Free, but it was giving errors while cloning. The specific error was:

Code:

ReadFailed - 22 - brokenpipe  m_p SegmentToRestore -> m_FileSystem. ReadFile failed - WriteFilem System Data failed - pDataRun==NULL - Remap MFT Record failed

The whitespaces on that might be wrong (I wrote it on paper to look it up), but it's pretty close. I couldn't find anything useful about that error online, but I'm guessing that they stemmed from the hard drive failing.

When trying to create an image of the hard drive, I was getting an I/O Error after around 80%. Sorry, I didn't write down the exact error.

After quite a bit of digging, though, I found a somewhat hard-to-find way to make Macrium create an image while ignoring errors. To do so, go to:

Other tasks > Edit defaults > Advanced

Then place a check next to "Ignore bad sectors when creating images".

Before making an image, you should try to correct any errors on your hard drive. I used chkdsk; go to Start > Run, then type "cmd" (without the quotes). In the DOS-like box that opens, type:

chkdsk /r /f

(There's some question of whether the /f is needed since it should be implemented automatically be using /r, but there's harm in using it)

You'll need to reboot your computer after this to get it to scan. On my computer, it ran for about 8 hours!

After that's done, you'll want to Defrag to (hopefully) move any bad sectors to a portion of the source drive that's not being used. I don't know if it helped or not, but I read that tip elsewhere and figured it couldn't hurt anything.

Once the scan was complete, I then created an image of the source drive, and it finally succeeded!

Be forewarned, though, that based on information given in this thread, it's still possible that this image will contain the errors found in the source drive, so when you restore it to the new drive you could be copying errors back over. That might be OK, but it might not be. In my case it seemed to be OK, but I'm not sure whether it's because chkdsk fixed the errors, defrag moved the errors, or if I was just lucky.

I hope this helps someone in the future!

Jason Carlton said:

After quite a bit of digging, though, I found a somewhat hard-to-find way to make Macrium create an image while ignoring errors. To do so, go to:

Other tasks > Edit defaults > Advanced

Then place a check next to "Ignore bad sectors when creating images".

That's good to know, thanks. I wonder if it's the same function as AOMIE's "sector by sector" backup, which they recommend when there are disk problems.

Before making an image, you should try to correct any errors on your hard drive. I used chkdsk; go to Start > Run, then type "cmd" (without the quotes). In the DOS-like box that opens, type:

chkdsk /r /f

(There's some question of whether the /f is needed since it should be implemented automatically be using /r, but there's harm in using it)

The /f is implied by /r and isn't necessary.

I have some doubt about the wisdom of trying to correct sectors on a bad disk before imaging, because the repair process might send more sectors over the edge. I tend to think it's better just to get the image captured as quickly as possible, then deal with any problems when it's on a disk you can work with. But I suppose in some cases data on failing sectors actually will be rescued by chkdsk.

paul1149 said:

I have some doubt about the wisdom of trying to correct sectors on a bad disk before imaging, because the repair process might send more sectors over the edge. I tend to think it's better just to get the image captured as quickly as possible, then deal with any problems when it's on a disk you can work with. But I suppose in some cases data on failing sectors actually will be rescued by chkdsk.

I had a similar thought myself, but just dove in. In retrospect, I should have probably created an image before doing any scans, then ran the scans, then created a second image. That way, if there were any problems scanning or if the second image failed, then I would have had a backup.