Cloning a failing HDD

[idoru]

hi,

I didn't see until some days ago (things were hard for y sight this last monthes) the blinking icon of a monitered seagate 3 To HDD disk by my version of hard disk sentinel : accessing the data summary I was told the drive had a 5% health status and 2504 faulty/bad sectors that were relocated to the backup/safety zone.

Strangely the autotest found also that 14320 non viable sectors with a possible reallocation upon further use.

I tried to clone that disk using :
- acronis image : I got a revolving icon during the process and no progress at all after 30mns
- macrium rescue : it went past checking the file system, got a "full copy" and no progress also after the same time

I still can access the disk under windows, condition still at 5%.

I'm considering copying the bunch of movies/series/music using teracopy to the new disk but I am afraid that the srain might worser so I was wondering if there is some kind a sector by sector copy/cloning that may bypass this bad condition.


any help would be much appreciated !

 

[samuria]

One thing you must not do is clone it as it will copy bad sectors to the new drive which can't be removed. You only option is to try and copy most important files off but a lot may be corrupted

 

[SIW2]

Some software attempts to skip bad secotors. Really depends how much damage there is.

 

[idoru]

well thanks for for inputs...

I tried this magnificient piece of technology named clonezilla with file table repair if possible and as it displayed 252 hours to complete, I tried to stop it, fisrt with escape (no luck) then CTRL-C.

Got a warning, rebooted and...baam both the new and old disks were screwed : lost partition for the old, bad scheme for the new (no matter).

I'm on the verge of restoring the lost partition with minitools then I"ll try to teracopy what I can from it.

 

[erpster4]

you could try Prosoft Data Rescue for Windows but the full non-demo version is not free


otherwise try a data recovery service from them if the failing HDD is beyond fixing with software

 

[RolandJS]

Macrium Reflect, AOMEI, EaseUS, and so many other free and fee programs are available to try. Some free versions are crippled versions, some are almost fully functional (very little difference between free and fee) programs. If memory serves, the three I just mentioned by name -- their free versions will work just fine.