Need Help Cloning Failing Hard Drive

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Seth Schaffer

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Aug 3, 2013
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My main drive, a Wester Digital Caviar Blue 500GB of over 3 years has finally run almost into the ground. It was working fine but reporting frightening SMART results a couple months ago, at which point I bought a brand new 500GB WD Black to replace it. However, try as I might, I cannot find a single way to clone the drive. Every windows application I try (including the built-in to Windows disk management utility, Macrium Reflect, and Ease-Us) has failed. Using a Macrium rescue CD to try and clone it failed after 5 hours, trying to clone using the application running after booting into windows reported "broken pipe" and other errors all alluding to Windows Volume Shadow Copy service failing, a problem I have come across before. Naturally, I decided to move away from Windows and use an Ubuntu 14.04 Live CD, butt his too failed, as did CloneZilla. My drive is now at the point where I cannot successfully boot into it without several attempts. Am I totally screwed, or is there still a way to clone it or image it and restore the image to the new drive?

I have all my important data backed up and all that has been taken care of, but it would still be nice to not have to reinstall everything all over again. It would take me weeks to get things close to the way they were.
 
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Calculagator

Calculagator

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Nov 18, 2014
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You can use the little linux utility dd, but be careful.
Something like:
sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512 conv=sync,noerror
This will copy 512 bits at a time from sda to sdb (overwriting anything on sdb). You can increase bs to make it work faster, but any errors will have a larger effect. The conv=sync will cause read errors to be filled with 0s. The conv=noerror will keep it running even if it encounters errors. This will take a long time, but will be probably the most complete copy you can get. If this doesn't pick it up, it won't be easily recoverable.
 
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ArtPog

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Sep 17, 2014
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It certainly appears that you are working with a defective HDD. Frankly, the more you work with it the greater the chances that more & more corruption of the data will take place to the possible point that future data recovery will be well-nigh impossible.

I would NOT advise you at this point to continue using this or that disk-cloning program or any other program that will be manipulating data. I would strongly advise you that while the drive is at least still accessible to copy over as much data as you can starting with your most important & precious personal data files. Use whatever media is available to you including flash drives, CD/DVDs, perhaps one or more HDDs, etc.
 
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Seth Schaffer

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Aug 3, 2013
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Unfortunately, I already tried exactly that to no avail. dd too failed.


 
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Seth Schaffer

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Aug 3, 2013
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I have a constantly updated backup of all my mildly important stuff, my music backed up there and to a flash drive, along with my most important files backed to the cloud. On the files from I'm totally safe already. Also I'm well aware that the drive is becoming defective, otherwise I wouldn't be trying to clone it. It's been in use for years.
 
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ArtPog

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Sep 17, 2014
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Fine. As long as you've backed up your files you have your safety net. So you can now manipulate the apparently failing drive to your heart's content.

You've indicated that a number of disk-cloning programs that you've tried have not been successful. It's not really surprising since many of those programs will balk at the disk-cloning operation when they encounter a seriously corrupt/failing source disk.

While we've used the Macrium Reflect Free program a number of times with good results our day-to-day disk-cloning program is the Casper program (http://www.fssdev.com). Don't know if you're familiar with this program. For a variety of reasons it's the best disk-cloning program we've ever used. But the program is not a freebie - it costs $49.99 and most users simply won't tolerate that cost since there are so many free ones available. Especially since most users seem to be solely interested in a one-shot disk-cloning operation to clone their present HDD to a SSD or to a larger disk. The major advantage of Casper is its rather extraordinary speed when the program is used routinely & frequently. So it makes an ideal vehicle for maintaining up-to-date comprehensive backups of one's program. We frequently use it on a daily basis with some of our systems. But I have to add that even Casper will balk at times when it encounters a defective source disk. It all depends.

There's a saying among "disk-cloners" to the effect that "if you clone garbage, garbage is what you'll get." C'est la vie.

If available, you may also want to try that Acronis True Image program. Good luck.
 
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