Cloning to new SSD from failing HDD

Hi all,

I'm working on my GF's laptop. It's an HP, and the HDD is starting to fail. I ordered a new SSD for her, but I'm having a hard time getting the old one cloned over; she has about 80G of data, and the old drive keeps crashing in the middle of processing! I've tried both cloning and creating an image (for several days now), but have problems with both.

The new SSD currently has an unnamed partition from the earlier cloning attempt, and I assume it has boot data on it. Then I have a G: drive with the "Recovery" data from HP. Then I have an H: drive that's empty, and SHOULD hold all of the old drive's C: data. I had to create the H: label manually under Disk Management; before, I just had the unnamed partition, then G:, then an unallocated partition.

So here's my question:

Since I have the unnamed partition, can I just manually copy C: from the old drive to H: on the new drive, then swap the drives? Would H: then automatically become C:, and everything work like it should?

Manually copying data is going to take forever, but it would at least let me pick up where I left off each time the HDD crashes.

If that won't work, what is a better alternative?

essenbe said:

ason, here is a tutorial on how to do it. SSD - Install and Transfer the Operating System
The Paragon way is the easiest way, but not free.

However, if your hard drive is failing, I would recommend a clean install as ICIT2LOL said. If your failing hard drive has bad sectors or errors, as most would, you would be carrying them over to the new SSD.

I have used Casper 8 to clone my SSD C: drive to an ext. USB drive as a practice for cloning on to the SSD after a future fault (which I haven't done yet). From looking at the list of what was cloned it seemed to be complete. Casper does cloning and some other backups only (including bootable backups) but not the drive management that Paragon does. It is not expensive.

Thanks for the advice!

Unfortunately, this laptop came pre-loaded with Win7, so there aren't any disks with it. Unless there's a way to clean boot using the "Recovery" partition (I have no idea what that partition is for) then my only alternative would be to buy a new OS copy.

She also has several paid programs that I don't think will re-install without re-purchasing, like Quickbooks. So if I do a clean install, she'll have to at least spend a few hundred dollars on software :-(

The cloning software I used was the free version of Macrium Reflect. I'm making one last attempt using the Windows Backup & Restore option (backing up to an old 200G HDD that I had laying around), but even if that works I'm not 100% sure how to restore it to the new SSD.

Essenbe, I've read through the tutorial you linked, and it looks like I'm halfway through the "Geeky way". The bootable partition already exists, and the rest of the SSD seems to be working correctly after I assigned a letter in Disk Management. So if the Windows Backup & Restore actually completes then, hopefully, I'll be able to figure out how to restore it to the SSD.

Wish me luck! If this backup fails or if I get lost, I'll post back.

Have you tried a sector-by-sector image or clone? You could also try to replicate the drive partition-by-partition, in smaller chunks as it were, for the sake of the failing HD. Then you will need to run an external WinRE disk to repair the boot.

Using Windows Backup failed, too, so...

Layback, I could be wrong because I haven't had to do this in a few years, but last time we tried to re-install Quickbooks it wouldn't work. It wasn't an issue of not having the right key, it was an issue that the key was coded to the hard drive. Their system assumed that we were trying to install it on a second computer, so the install failed. Which was very irritating.

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?

Or, is there a cloning / imaging program that will take the source drive in small chunks, and then after it's all copied mash it all in to one big image?

Essenbe, I bought my laptop at the same time as hers (but mine's a Toshiba), and AFAIK they have the same version of Win7. Mine didn't come with CDs either, though. Is there a way to create an install disk from the content that the laptops came with?

I agree that making an image SHOULD be simple, but this one keeps breaking because of the failing drive. I don't know of a way to make it ignore the error section and continue with the image, and it's pretty frustrating to let it run for 3+ hours and then throw an error when it gets to 80%!


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For future readers, I tried manually copying using:

robocopy C:\ H:\ /MT:10

(where C: is the source drive, H: is the large partition on the new drive, and /MT:10 means to use 10 threads)

But immediately it began to fail because several .SYS files were in use. It appears that the only way to do this would be if I could boot into DOS, which doesn't appear to be an option in Win7+. So at this point, it looks like my only options are to either find a way to reinstall Windows (even though the laptop didn't come with disks) or to clone the source drive (even though it's throwing errors and failing).