copy from drive to drive - having serious problems

[Red Squirrel]

I always figured this was a no brainer... but guess what, it's a PIA and not working.

I tried the following:

Acronis: clone entire drive, and resize manually. result: new drive corrupted
Acronis: clone entire drive but don't resize - worked, until I tried resizing in partition magic. result: froze, corrupted again as I had to ctrl+alt+del, it was stuck on a percent and the hdd was stuck in a loop.

do a copy directly with partition magic. result: freezes again too.

WTF?!?! How can I do this? It's very simple, I have a 16GB C partition I want to image to like 50Gig, and create a new partition using the rest of the space and manually copy over the files.

So why is it being so stuburn with me? Can windows even handle a 300GB drive? From the looks of it, I think it can't. I'm just really scared this is a hardware problem. If it is, I almost feel like just dying, I can't afford a hardware failure when I just finished paying over 200 bucks for that drive. good deal, but still lot of money to dish out on something if it's going to fail me like this.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I think the drive is fubar. Anythin I try, it ends up showing up as corrupted partition table. thing is, windows installed fine on it, but then when I partitioned the rest, it did not report the right size, and this is not an acuracy issue, 79GB is FAR from 200GB, which is what the partition was suppost to be. If I read it in partition magic it just reported as errornous, if I used a disk diagnostic utility, it said some partitions overlapped, and that there was some reletive bad sectors. I paid over 200 bucks for this, is there a way I can fix this myself? low level format maybe?

 

[tcsenter]

Try zero-writing it with the manufacturer's drive utilities (if available), then do a full surface scan. Some of the factory utilities will scan on-the-fly and recover sectors previously marked as bad.

Definitively, you can use SpinRite 6 at Level 4 or 5 diagnostic and recovery mode. If SpinRite doesn't fix your drive, no commercially available utility will (time to RMA for service).

 

[Red Squirrel]

Turns out windows does not like 300GB drives. Poped it in my linux server, deleted all the damaged partitions, partitioned it (as a server drive, just needed 1, in this case), formatted, fscked it (sounds funny) and mounted it, and boom, works great. Oh well, my network is fast enough I guess, even VMs will run at decent speed over it, though not as fast as local of course.