Clone the hard drive with bad sectors

chris0147 · 03 Jan 2024

Hi all,

I need your advice, I am thinking about make an image of my old HDD hard drive to put them on another hard drive, so I could recover my files on another drive. I don't have any problem with accessing the drive, but I am having a problem with accessing my files through on the data recovery program because it have bad sectors and I have lost my files due to computer went crash.

When I attempted to scan my files through on the data recovery program, it will take hours to scan my files and I don't want to make it worse that would put the stress on the drive and it get died before I attempt to recover my files.

Do you think it is a good idea if I should make an image of the disk with bad sectors to put them on another disk so I could attempt to recover my files on another drive or do you think if I should send the faulty disk to a professional data recovery company who will do this more easily?

I hope it will give you an idea with what I am trying to do to save my money without send the drive to a professional data recovery company.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance

SIW2 · 03 Jan 2024

It is sensible to clone the disk and attempt recovery from the clone. Less risk of damaging the original.
Professional data recovery is not cheap.

Clonezilla / Discussion /
Clonezilla live: Cloning disk with bad sector

-rescue option should skip the bad sectors when creating the clone. That will be easier to attempt recovery from. If any data was actually on the bad sectors, tough luck. If you are lucky most or all of the important stuff will be ok.

* Boot from clonezilla-live.iso
1. Choose language - default (en_US.UTF-8)
2. Don't touch keymap
3. Start Clonezilla
4. device-device
5. Expert
6. disk_to_local_disk
7. select source disk (e.g. hdb)
8. select target disk (e.g. sda)
9. Here is the screen with available options:
-g auto
-e1 auto
-e2
-j2
-r
-nogui
-m
-rescue
-fsck-src-part
-o
-b
-v
(Try to scroll up/down if you don't see these all)
10. Some settings for target partition table
11. Confirmation screen. You can see the generated command line. For rescue - it contains "-rescue" option.

samuria · 04 Jan 2024

Its very dodgy if bad sectors get copied to the new drive you cant undo it

chris0147 · 04 Jan 2024

SIW2 said:

It is sensible to clone the disk and attempt recovery from the clone. Less risk of damaging the original.
Professional data recovery is not cheap.

Clonezilla / Discussion /
Clonezilla live: Cloning disk with bad sector

-rescue option should skip the bad sectors when creating the clone. That will be easier to attempt recovery from. If any data was actually on the bad sectors, tough luck. If you are lucky most or all of the important stuff will be ok.

* Boot from clonezilla-live.iso
1. Choose language - default (en_US.UTF-8)
2. Don't touch keymap
3. Start Clonezilla
4. device-device
5. Expert
6. disk_to_local_disk
7. select source disk (e.g. hdb)
8. select target disk (e.g. sda)
9. Here is the screen with available options:
-g auto
-e1 auto
-e2
-j2
-r
-nogui
-m
-rescue
-fsck-src-part
-o
-b
-v
(Try to scroll up/down if you don't see these all)
10. Some settings for target partition table
11. Confirmation screen. You can see the generated command line. For rescue - it contains "-rescue" option.

Thanks. If I use clonezilla to clone my bad HDD, can I be able to recover my data as the sectors is bad??

Will my data go corrupt if I clone the hdd?

Do you think if I am better off to go to data recovery company to recover my data without corrupt my data than clone on my drive??

SIW2 · 04 Jan 2024

It depends how important the data is to you. Ask some recovery companies what the cost would be and try and find out how reliable/successful the company is.

ssokolow · 3 Days Ago

If you're trying this yourself instead of paying professionals, I'd use GNU ddrescue. It's designed for this kind of situation. (Though, if you can't plug the drive in as a secondary drive and boot off something else, you'll need the Linux version on a boot disk.)

I linked to a guide for the optional GUI that's available for basically everything but my usual approach is a Linux boot disk, so, for the Linux CLI version, you run it as ddrescue /dev/source_drive /wherever/destination.img /wherever/destination.log (optionally with command-line arguments to tune its reading strategy) and it will try try to get as much data as possible and then go back to try to "trim" the bad areas and, as long as you told it to write a log so it kept a record of which sectors were bad, you can re-run it as many times as you want to retry the recovery of the bad regions.

There's also ddrescueview which can use the log file to show a defragmenter-esque view of which sectors in a ddrescue dump are good, bad, not yet tried, not yet trimmed, etc. and can be set to re-read the log every X seconds for a live-updating view as ddrescue dumps.