Best method/tool for cloning a failing HDD for Data Recovery?

Just to prepare in advance - If all goes well and I'm able to run windows etc on my new HDD, do I
(1) Need to activate Windows, Office licenses etc. or will those be taken care of?
(2) Need to run anything else other than chkdsk and sfc scannow on the new HDD?

Thanks,

1. No.
2. No.

(yes, jumanji, I'm shamelessly copying you but that is how I'm feeling right now )

Thank you jumanji for your assistance.

Finally, after 22.4 hours, I have the following:

rescued - 750155 MB errsize-1010 kB
ipos/opos - 746444 errors - 358

Laptop booted fine.

Ran chkdsk on all partitions, it found errors and said that it fixed them

Then ran SFC and got the following:

"Beginning system scan. This process will take some time.
Beginning verification phase of system scan.
Verification 100% complete.
Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of th
em.
Details are included in the CBS.Log windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For example
C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log"

I've taken out all sections with today's date and copied them to a text file.

Please let me know what I should do next.

Thanks again for your assistance.

P.S. Sending this from the NEW HDD that was rescued to from the bad HDD.

One thing I forgot to ask.

I checked the flash drive but did not see recovery.log file. does it get destroyed after ddrescue is done?

nkaufman said:

One thing I forgot to ask.

I checked the flash drive but did not see recovery.log file. does it get destroyed after ddrescue is done?

It should I think still be there.
If you used windows to view a linux partition, it cant see it, but linux can see windows files.

I am glad it worked, actually it is surprising that some critical file was not damaged.

sdowney717 said:

It should I think still be there.
If you used windows to view a linux partition, it cant see it, but linux can see windows files.

I am glad it worked, actually it is surprising that some critical file was not damaged.

Yes, I have windows laptop and I was trying to look for that file. So, how can I look at the Recovery.log file generated by ddrescue?

Could it be that as soon as I got SMART error, I minimized usage on the disk and that is why the actual Re-allocated Sector counts on my disk went to 135 when the threshold was 140 i.e. only 5 more sectors went bad after the threshold was breached, if I understood this correctly?

And I called WD the same day that I got the error last Wednesday, got the HDD this past Monday, ran ddrescue and today Tuesday got my new HDD working.

Posted my log here:
How do you fix corrupted files found by SFC /SCANNOW?

How did you run ddrescue?
Did you just get booted to a command prompt?
If you boot up a liveusb of linux OS like ubuntu, then you can plug the flash drive in and with file manager view the files on the flash drive.

sdowney717 said:

How did you run ddrescue?
Did you just get booted to a command prompt?
If you boot up a liveusb of linux OS like ubuntu, then you can plug the flash drive in and with file manager view the files on the flash drive.

Ran ddrescue (via flash drive) based on jumanji's instruction in an earlier post in this thread.

So do I need to boot using the flash drive and come to Unix prompt? If so, then what commands do I enter? (afraid I have minimal Unix skills)

Thanks,

Was looking at Disk Management and see the following. Hope everything looks ok.

Thanks,