Solved Imaging a damaged hard drive

[diplo]

I'm looking for a way to image a windows installation from a machine whose drive I believe to be corrupted. The symptoms are slow, unresponsive windows explorer (file explorer won't launch, start menu search doesn't function). The disk light is always on, and it isn't usable in safe mode either. A chkdsk /f was stuck for almost a week and never completed successfully because I need to move onward.

My question is: how do I best recover all the installed programs or the system as it exists with the hard drive in this state? Is it possible? Will windows backup (if I can even open it) image bad sectors? I have a feeling the failing sectors of the drive contain critical windows files since basic navigation is almost a dead standstill.

Thanks in advance.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Hello Diplo look I use Ubuntu to retrieve data etc as you will see from this small ditty I made up - I don't know if this will be of any use to you. As well there is an application that is run from within a Linux Mint MATE boot OS but I find this does the job for what I want.

BOOTABLE UBUNTU

Make a bootable Ubuntu disk http://www.ubuntu.com/download

Set the BIOS to boot from theoptical when the machine boots it will show you a screen with TRY or INSTALL> select TRYnot INSTALL

When it is finished - it takes verylittle time you will get a screen like in the pic .

Open the drive you want > Userand dig down until you get to the data / settings you may be able to copy /paste the material you want to an external source or other installed drive doingthis.

I am not sure if it will but I haverecovered tons of data etc using this method both on "dead" or justplain drives that you cannot get data from using Windows.

I use this by accessing the drive while it is installed in the machine or via an USB to SATA adaptor - see pic

But this might not be what you are after and in that case I am not aware of how to image whilst in another environment.

 

[Dave Atkin]

Personally I would purchase a Disk Imaging Solution like Acronis True Image Home and create an image with that.

If you find it takes too long to run or crashes then I'd purchase an external SATA USB Caddy and connect it (as well as your damaged hard drive) to an another PC - Running the backup software on there - We do this with most of our failing machines to get an image.

Have you tried booting the machine in safe mode to see if it still performs the same? I ask because we've come across a number of instances were Windows Update has used massive amounts of Disk IO and CPU.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Personally I would purchase a Disk Imaging Solution like Acronis True Image Home and create an image with that.

Yep that is if you are going to image and I do on a regular basis with Macrium using this tutorial - I was just quoting what I did in case the drive is almost dead or dead and which function is not a part of the Windows system - that I know of?
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html
Plus of course this software is free and has an option of the full blown program which I have had on my machines and it is very good but I have too man machines to afford the full version

 

[diplo]

Thank you for the responses. While these solutions are probably fine, I was fortunate enough to have found a system restore disk that had been made for this laptop. I've used this to get the machine running again and transfer the backed up files from a USB drive to get it to an acceptable state.

 

[Dave Atkin]

Thank you for updating us diplo. Glad you managed to resolve your issue.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Yep hope it all goes well

 

[mjf]

Thank you for the responses. While these solutions are probably fine, I was fortunate enough to have found a system restore disk that had been made for this laptop. I've used this to get the machine running again and transfer the backed up files from a USB drive to get it to an acceptable state.

You said the HDD was damaged. If you didn't replace the HDD I'd run diagnostics on it again or you may have problems again later on.