Hard time cloning hard drive

[wseyller]

I have a hard drive with win xp pro sp3. The drive very old but with a fairly new install. I have noticed repeating errors in event viewer suggesting the hard drive go bad soon. It seems to run well otherwise

I am using Norton Ghost 15 to make an image but it fails at the end due to bad sections. I even then checked Ghost to ignore them and it still fails. Also I noticed near the end that the hard drive was making a strange noise just before it failed.

Any tips on how I could get this drive cloned to a new one successfully.

 

[RebateMonger]

It's hard to predict what, if any, cloning software will be able to get around the errors.

There's certainly professional hardware/software that can clone the disk and work around the errors, but I don't know what that is and what it costs.

At this point, if it was my drive, I'd use software like Microsoft's free RoboCopy utility and copy any important files elsewhere. Unlike Windows Explorer, RoboCopy can be instructed to skip unreadable files without crashing the entire copy job.

Make a list of the files you want, in order of their importance, and copy them in that order. The more you exercise that disk the more likely it'll fail completely, so get what you really need, now.

 

[wseyller]

It's hard to predict what, if any, cloning software will be able to get around the errors.

There's certainly professional hardware/software that can clone the disk and work around the errors, but I don't know what that is and what it costs.

At this point, if it was my drive, I'd use software like Microsoft's free RoboCopy utility and copy any important files elsewhere. Unlike Windows Explorer, RoboCopy can be instructed to skip unreadable files without crashing the entire copy job.

Make a list of the files you want, in order of their importance, and copy them in that order. The more you exercise that disk the more likely it'll fail completely, so get what you really need, now.

Well I have the data that is important like our company data files, documents & such. I just tried the built in windows backup tool also with failure. I am just trying to avoid reinstalling mobo disk drivers, print devices, anti-virus, software & such.

I do have was appears to be a good copy of the "System State" from windows backup. What will happen when I restore this to a fresh installation.

 

[corkyg]

Instead of cloning, can you try the backup/restore function?

 

[wseyller]

Instead of cloning, can you try the backup/restore function?

I tried that also with no luck. Event viewer has hundreds of errors & warnings about error during paging operations. The newest errors says there is a bad block.

 

[razel]

I agree with IMMEDIATELY copying your most important data off of there. Then I'd worry about cloning... etc. Once you have your preciousness copied and you can live with the drive failing. You're better off running the HDD manufacturer's diagnosis software. Some such as Seagate and Hitachi can copy whatever it can read from bad sectors and remap to good sectors.. which then you can do a clone.

Another option is to use chkdsk in WinXP to look for and mark sectors as bad. That may then allow you to do a clone. I believe the command is chkdsk c: /r where c: is your drive letter. Best of luck.

 

[RebateMonger]

I do have was appears to be a good copy of the "System State" from windows backup. What will happen when I restore this to a fresh installation.

System State won't solve the problem that you mention --- losing your installed programs.

Several data recovery programs give away disk imaging software so that you can do data recovery on the images rather than the disk itself. Check out GetDataBack's site, http://runtime.org. But there are definite limits how much can be done with software when a disk has physical problems.

In the long run, you likely will spend more time trying to successfully make an image from a failing disk than it would take to just reinstall everything on a new disk.

 

[wseyller]

chkdsk, i tried it before anything. I have another hard drive in to reinstall windows. I have a free program called driverbackup. You can choose with drivers you want to backup, all/oem/thirdparty or choose specific ones. I am going to try it out and see if it's worth anything. I started to realize that I need to give up and just get it done.

 

[razel]

Did you try chkdsk with the /r option? That will mark any areas with read data errors as bad and copy whatever it can onto a different area. That may allow you to use a cloning program that you had issues with since it encountered bad sectors. If that cloning program still has issues, it's probably ignoring the filesystem and you'll have to hope that the HDD manufacturer's diagnosis program will remap it outside the filesystem.

 

[dfuze]

As others have said, backup your important data then go for the clone. With cloning, I've had good luck using the free Acronis True Image you can use with Seagate and WD drives (download from their websites).