spinning HD > SSD clone super slow, /w errors

[zdoe]

for many years already, i clone my system drive every few months to another HD and keep it as a backup. if/when the system gets corrupted, i just swap drives and copy the latest data to the clone.

for cloning i use USB-booting paragon Hard Disk Manager, and the HD raw copy option.

so i did just reach out for my clone and booted. all is good.

but when i tried to make a new clone, spinning HD to SSD, the copy takes 10 hours instead the usual 3. and when i tested the new clone, on first boot it first runs chkdsk and finds a ton of errors (none on the source). it boots, but windows is corrupt on it - so obviously the cloning didn't succeed.

what could be the problem? has my SSD gone south? or - should i erase/empty it before cloning onto it?

i'm on a win7 laptop, the spinning drive is Hitachi 1Tb, the SSD a samsung evo 850.

 

[Megahertz07]

Try to use Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free
If your SSD is smaller than 1T, you must resize the C partition to fit.

 

[mrjimphelps]

How old is your hard drive? Maybe it is going bad.

 

[zdoe]

How old is your hard drive? Maybe it is going bad.

a year and a 1/2. but my computer is always on, so it does have quite a bit of mileage.

SSD TRIM : why cant the drive initiate this itself? - [Solved] - Storage
TicksOnTech: TRIM For the masses

these articles make me think that i should erase first, then trim. but forcetrim utility hiccups on a 1Tb partition.

 

[Megahertz07]

As I know, trim is only for SSD's.
- TRIM
Type this cmd
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

It will give you one of two results, either a 0 or a 1. A zero indicates that TRIM is enabled correctly, a one means that it is not. If you have a TRIM-compatible SSD, but find that Windows 7 hasn't enabled the command, you can easily do so by running this command:

fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0

 

[mrjimphelps]

It is possible that your hard drive is bad; but it isn't very old, so that's not likely.

My computer is always on, and my drive is holding up just fine. I have always operated that way, and it hasn't appeared to put any additional wear on my hard drives.

Like Megahertz said above, use Macrium Reflect Free to do the backup. And try doing an image backup rather than a clone backup. I recently used Macrium Reflect Free to do an image backup of a 750 GB hard drive, and I then restored the image to a 120 GB SSD. It worked without any problems. I then set up TRIM on the SSD, and I was good to go. The SSD became my C: drive (my primary Windows drive), and it's been working fine for several months now.

 

[Megahertz07]

Boot from Win 7 installation disk, go to repair and launch a CMD window.
Type
chkdsk c: /f

Pay attention on the results, specially for bad clusters or bad blocks.

 

[zdoe]

As I know, trim is only for SSD's.
- TRIM
Type this cmd
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

It will give you one of two results, either a 0 or a 1. A zero indicates that TRIM is enabled correctly...
fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0

yes, of course trim is only SSD. how the system knows what kind of drive, i'm not sure.

Trim is enabled, but it doesn't really apply in my situation, as it does its thing on deleted sectors on system idle time as determined by the OS. during a clone, each and every sector gets written to, and there is no idle time.

delete all contents, then forcetrim would work, if only the utility worked on a big partition.

another thought - what if i delete the partition, not its contents? what does the SSD do then, internally? i assume it still needs the deleted sectors "trimmed."

but yes, on the first clone onto the SSD there was no problem as its sectors are, off the shelf, "trimmed."

 

[mrjimphelps]

what if i delete the partition, not its contents?

If you delete the partition, the contents are deleted with it. And once you delete it, it's gone forever.

If you want to delete a partition without deleting the contents, the only way to do that is to back it up first, then delete the partition, then recreate the partition, then restore the backup to the new partition.

 

[zdoe]

well, my wording was funky.

but yes i WANT the drive to be in its virgin state. zero data on it.

 

[Megahertz07]

To "reset" a disk to zero data you must delete ALL partitions a leave it unallocated (not formatted).

 

[TechnoMage2016]

Over the years, I can't begin to recount how many horror stories I've read about problems that people have with backing up or Cloning their HD's.

Since 1997 when a little known New Zealand software company released "Ghost", a backup and cloning program, I've been using that (and a few updates to it) to do all my HD backups and clones.

I regularly CLONE my C: drive, a 128GB SSD, to a 1TB Seagate spinner, using Ghost 11.5.
No problems. I also make compressed backups of my C: drive to a Backup folder on my 1TB Toshiba External HD (USB 3.0).

None of the backups that I do with Ghost, ever take more than 30 minutes, and none ever fail. That's 20 years of backups with never a problem, and while using basically the same program.

I boot up my PC with a DOS boot CD and run Ghost 11.5 from there, in DOS. That takes Windows and all its idiosyncrasies out of the game. Something as important as a HD backup should not be subject to something as unstable as MS Windows.
Ghost 11.5 will back up Linux too, or Windows Server. It just don't care...it backs up whatever it sees on the HD.

Cheers Mates!
TechnoMage

 

[Megahertz07]

Techno, I thought Ghost was a Symantec / Norton program.
Does it clones a GPT drive?

 

[TechnoMage2016]

JFYI.....
"Ghost (an acronym for general hardware-oriented system transfer[5]) is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research. The technology was acquired in 1998 by Symantec." (from Wikipedia)

Ghost was bought by Symantec in 1998, and updated some, in DOS mode, to work with NTFS disks.
Originally it was a DOS program. Ghost 11.5 was the last version (~2005) that ran in DOS, but was too big to fit any longer on a 3.5" floppy disk. So it was necessary to run it from either a Flash Drive or CD.

I have it on flash drives, CD's and even an SD Memory card, all bootable.

Symantec also modified Ghost to run in Windows, but that sort of kills it, because you can't run the program once the HD is corrupted and Windows won't boot.
Ghost on CD, will backup even a NON-Windows HD. Like a data disk or Linux HD.

Symantec has since abandoned Ghost entirely, with NO program availability or support.

EaseUS Disk Manager tells me that my C: drive is on an MBR drive. For anything else, all I can say is "Give it a try". It's no longer available from or supported by Symantec, but like so many other abandoned programs, "It's out there!, in the cloud, somewhere".

Just for fun, today, I downloaded the ISO for Ghost 11.5, burned it to a CD and did a C: drive (compressed) backup of my C: partition to my Storage partition. It ran perfectly and took 26 minutes, to do a HIGH Compression backup. (HIGH compression takes longer than NO, or FAST compression) I only use High Compression to save space, when backing up C: to a second partition or to a DVD.

Cheers Mates!

 

[zdoe]

To "reset" a disk to zero data you must delete ALL partitions a leave it unallocated (not formatted).

well, i hope this is true. but according to the article i quoted earlier, it seems that an SSD needs another write operation to "free" a sector of it previous contents that have been marked deleted. so how does the drive know that the partition has been deleted and it's OK to "free" the data on each sector that was on that partition? and if it does, that means that one should keep the drive powered up so that it has time to do so.

last night i made a clone on a spinning drive, just to isolate the problem. 4 hours instead of 10, and no chkdsk errors afterwards.

and yes, ghost is ok - the paragon hard disk manager program that i use is similar in that it doesn't give a hoot what's on the drive. i say paragon is better, because it doesn't use/have any proprietary format of its own, it just clones the drive sector by sector, having first booted the system up to a (custom?) linux environment. so if your drive had partitions/data, it recreates them onto the clone.

any image file format, as good as it may be, is an an added intermediary step.

 

[Megahertz07]

One thing is to clean the allocation tables, the other is to clean the bits on the cluster. When you format, you clean the allocation table. The data will remain untouched on the cluster.

I never clone using sector by sector.
- It will take much longer as it will copy "blank" clusters.
- It will clone bad clusters.
- The resulted drive will be fragmented as the source is

Not sure if you can clone using sector by sector from a bigger disk to a smaller disk.

Try Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free
Don't use sector by sector. It will be faster and unfragmented.

 

[zdoe]

well, i just did another clone to the SSD without the "raw" HD copy options. the win partition copied correctly (& with no chkdsk errors), but the HFS+ partition did not copy at all. so the clone is not a clone, but yes, producing the "clone" is 2x faster this way.

of course i don't know how exactly paragon manipulates the file system on a win partition when copying the data over this way, or if it does at all. resulting copy is still as fragmented as the source.

anyway - fingers crossed that the SSD is ok. given right now it appears so, i'll not do another test of "raw" copy until next time when the OS/drive gets corrupt.

fyi - what i'm using is USB booting paragon hard disk manager 12.