Ghost it or Nuke and Pave?

[coffee]

Ok I would like to find out what others are doing if at all. Customer has a laptop in for service and its a failing hard drive. 30 bad sectors on the drive. Ok- replace drive. No brainer. I replaced and reinstalled windows7 home premium. Thinking afterwards "You know, Perhaps it would have worked out faster to just do a 1 to 1 copy of the old drive to the new one? This would preserve all their programs and also the hidden OEM restore partition.

What is your prefered way?

Normally I do a complete reinstall, backup their files and throw them on the new drive in a directory on the desktop called "backup". But that leaves the OEM restore partition out of the new drive and any installed programs they had. Might ghosting the old drive be better in this case since the old drive hasnt exactly failed?

Your thoughts are welcome.

 

[PCX]

Typically we replace the hard drive, back up the data and reinstall the OS. However, we do offer the option to clone the drive. The price depends on the condition of the drive. With 30 bad sectors, its probably safe to say that it would have been doable. With hundreds or even thousands, you will be doing a lot more troubleshooting to clean up the system. For drives like that, you need to charge way more, but thats typically only going to be feasible for businesses. Hard drives with read errors are usually good to clone as well.

This is where I would draw the line

Feasible to do clone when

Done for a business
Low number of bad sectors
Read Errors
Clean OS with most updates and drivers


Not worth doing unless getting paid more for your time

Lots of bad sectors
Really bad read error
Bad OS install (viruses, no or little updates, old drivers, desperate need of a tune-up)

Finally if the HDD had been failing for a long time and they are just now getting it replaced, then its probably safe to say that you are going to spend more time on cleaning up the OS and making it useable. Which is fine, as long as they are willing to pay for your time.

 

[mraikes]

I clone whenever possible. The benefits of preserving all programs etc (usually) outweigh the drawbacks.

 

[PCX]

I clone whenever possible. The benefits of preserving all programs etc (usually) outweigh the drawbacks.

Again, only when you are getting paid enough for it. You can literally spend hours on trying to get a system to run properly again. Just make sure that if you do this that you charge accordingly.

 

[coffee]

Thanks for the reply. I do mostly residential work here and had been wondering this. Glad to get your input on it.

I figured there would be alot of "inconsistancies" in programs and such that would make it not a real feasable alternative to reinstall.

Background on call: Gateway laptop 1yr. old with Toshiba hard drive. Can you believe that the hd has only a 1 year warranty??? Got to stay away from those toshiba drives.

Partition layout is kinda cute:

pqservice partition (oem restore) - 1st partition and hidden ntfs, 16 gig in size.

boot partition 100mg +- - 2nd partition.

system partition - 3rd partition, remainder of drive, ntfs.

Im gonna dd the service partition and investigate it. I hate downloading all the drivers to get things going. win7 didnt discover the network drivers.

ok, thanks for your reply.

 

[mraikes]

Again, only when you are getting paid enough for it. You can literally spend hours on trying to get a system to run properly again. Just make sure that if you do this that you charge accordingly.

Hence the inclusion of "usually". With experience, high probability clones can be sorted from low probability. When performed judiciously it rarely takes hours to correct system issues.

 

[Mr.Mike]

Thanks for this PCX.

Typically we replace the hard drive, back up the data and reinstall the OS. However, we do offer the option to clone the drive. The price depends on the condition of the drive. With 30 bad sectors, its probably safe to say that it would have been doable. With hundreds or even thousands, you will be doing a lot more troubleshooting to clean up the system. For drives like that, you need to charge way more, but thats typically only going to be feasible for businesses. Hard drives with read errors are usually good to clone as well.

This is where I would draw the line

Feasible to do clone when

Done for a business
Low number of bad sectors
Read Errors
Clean OS with most updates and drivers


Not worth doing unless getting paid more for your time

Lots of bad sectors
Really bad read error
Bad OS install (viruses, no or little updates, old drivers, desperate need of a tune-up)

Finally if the HDD had been failing for a long time and they are just now getting it replaced, then its probably safe to say that you are going to spend more time on cleaning up the OS and making it useable. Which is fine, as long as they are willing to pay for your time.

Out of curiosity, where would you draw the line for the number of bad sectors before you consider it "bad"? I know there isn't a specific number because it's not that simple, but what would you say there would be the tipping point for giving up? What read error(s) would stop the work for you? Recently for me, it wasn't worth doing a bad drive that had only 16 bad sectors, but they included the boot/startup sectors.

 

[PCX]

Thanks for this PCX.



Out of curiosity, where would you draw the line for the number of bad sectors before you consider it "bad"? I know there isn't a specific number because it's not that simple, but what would you say there would be the tipping point for giving up? What read error(s) would stop the work for you? Recently for me, it wasn't worth doing a bad drive that had only 16 bad sectors, but they included the boot/startup sectors.

In general, we go by this standard.

10 or less, good to go.

10 - 20, need to at least warn the customer. If we feel that its a bigger issue, we will suggest to replace the hard drive.

20+ either they replace the hard drive or they can go somewhere else

Once you start going past 20 bad sectors, you start seeing more and more read errors. There is no real grade system on how bad a read error is, but in general, if the transfer rate is really really slow, then its going to fail really really soon and chances are there will be a lot of IO errors. Your best bet is too just recover the data as quickly as possible. If the read error is not that bad (you can still transfer data at a decent, but slow rate) then I would back up their data, then do a clone.

This is how we have been doing it and its worked well for us. The couple times we have strayed from this, it has bitten us in the rear.

 

[Paul Rodgers]

Again, only when you are getting paid enough for it. You can literally spend hours on trying to get a system to run properly again. Just make sure that if you do this that you charge accordingly.

I use Acronis and if it lets me clone I'm good. I just babysit it while doing something else. For the most part quicker and easier than a reinstall.

I don't get too many machines with failing drives so I may just be lucky when it does clone and doesn't give me issues.

 

[PCX]

I use Acronis and if it lets me clone I'm good. I just babysit it while doing something else. For the most part quicker and easier than a reinstall.

I don't get too many machines with failing drives so I may just be lucky when it does clone and doesn't give me issues.

Yeah, our most common service is HDD replacement.

 

[TenYardFight]

Yes, us too. We never clone though. I think we might be missing on some opportunities to deliver a better customer experience.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I clone whenever possible. The benefits of preserving all programs etc (usually) outweigh the drawbacks.

Same here....many times when a drive is beginning to fail, it can still be cloned. You can kick off the clone..and go do other work while it's cloning (usually under 30 minutes). Once done w/clone, once you swap the drives, boot up, kick off a chkdsk (again...something you can walk away from and tend to other work).

Depending on what areas were bad, or not, I'd say more often than not the result is a healthy usable system. Usually worth the attempt to clone it since much of that time is brief..and unattended. Judgement call based on experience of course....just learn to try to make a decision if the customers drive is something that can be cloned...or it's so full of errors that it's going to fail cloning.

 

[MobileTechie]

I clone as long as the installation is likely to work OK.

If it has problems, is 8 years old and super slow then I might N&P but I find people are much happier getting it back how it was before it went wrong. It's also a service that big box stores don't tend to offer and it's quicker for me too.

 

[coffee]

Ok, So I have the 30 bad sectors drive and we have plenty of time to play with it as the customer will be out of town for a week or so. Therefore, What I would like to do is keep this a rolling thread as to the progress and steps involved in cloning a drive with bad sectors to a new drive and repairing the damage. What the heck, Business is a bit slow and its always fun brushing up and learning things. If anything this will be a good workout for me. Follow along and I will post the progress as we go. But right now the rescue of partition 3 is gonna take a while!

Our POS drive is a toshiba 320 gig drive with a fantastic 1 year warranty (sarcasim). We have 30 bad sectors and will be cloning this to a new WD 320 gig drive.

First thing is first, We backup the POS drive to make sure we dont loose customer information. We also want to see where these bad sectors are located. But for all practicle purposes we are going to use dd_rescue to backup the partition with the data (not the boot partition). I have already backed up part1.

part 1 - hidden ntfs
part 2 - ntfs boot
part 3 - ntfs system
part 4 - ntfs size=0 (wtf? oh well)

dd_rescue /dev/sdc3 gatewaysdc3.iso

This will cruze thru the sectors making a copy of the partition and any sector errors will be recorded and skipped if it cannot recover them. This is in progress now and will take a while.

Next I will use clonezilla to do a copy of all partitions except part3. This I will treat different. I will restore from the iso file Iam making and hopefully the damage does not affect the actual O/S.

Keep in mind that the first partition is a hidden ntfs partition. This is listed as type 27 but in linux land it might show as unknown. I would think I will have to boot from a win7 rescue cd and make the first partition inactive.

Ok, Off to a service call. Ill post back later.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I don't use Clonezilla.....so I'm not familiar with it's abilities to do custom clones with advanced settings revealed like skip bad sectors. But most of the tools have those options if you do a custom clone or flip on some advanced mode.

Just...connect them..and give it a shot! Doesn't take much time to try.

 

[MobileTechie]

I tend to:

1. take a backup of data or quick image of just the main partition first
2. repair with HDD Regen, then take a whole drive backup,
3. then restore to a new drive.

Reasoning:

1. Secure data ASAP, just get bare minimum for speed.
2. Will often totally cure all disk related problems plus make cloning easier and produce a cleaner image.

 

[PCX]

Ok, So I have the 30 bad sectors drive and we have plenty of time to play with it as the customer will be out of town for a week or so. Therefore, What I would like to do is keep this a rolling thread as to the progress and steps involved in cloning a drive with bad sectors to a new drive and repairing the damage. What the heck, Business is a bit slow and its always fun brushing up and learning things. If anything this will be a good workout for me. Follow along and I will post the progress as we go. But right now the rescue of partition 3 is gonna take a while!

Our POS drive is a toshiba 320 gig drive with a fantastic 1 year warranty (sarcasim). We have 30 bad sectors and will be cloning this to a new WD 320 gig drive.

First thing is first, We backup the POS drive to make sure we dont loose customer information. We also want to see where these bad sectors are located. But for all practicle purposes we are going to use dd_rescue to backup the partition with the data (not the boot partition). I have already backed up part1.

part 1 - hidden ntfs
part 2 - ntfs boot
part 3 - ntfs system
part 4 - ntfs size=0 (wtf? oh well)

dd_rescue /dev/sdc3 gatewaysdc3.iso

This will cruze thru the sectors making a copy of the partition and any sector errors will be recorded and skipped if it cannot recover them. This is in progress now and will take a while.

Next I will use clonezilla to do a copy of all partitions except part3. This I will treat different. I will restore from the iso file Iam making and hopefully the damage does not affect the actual O/S.

Keep in mind that the first partition is a hidden ntfs partition. This is listed as type 27 but in linux land it might show as unknown. I would think I will have to boot from a win7 rescue cd and make the first partition inactive.

Ok, Off to a service call. Ill post back later.

Honestly, this process can be alot simpler . . .

First off, you ddrescue instead of dd_rescue. Its way more intuitive and stable. It will also automatically retry bad sectors if you specify with the -rX (x being the number of retries) without having to stop and force it to go again.

In all honesty, you can make an ISO of their data like are doing or you could simply back up their data first, then just clone the whole drive, including all the partitions.

The command for ddrescue would look something like this

ddrescue -v -r3 /dev/sdc /dev/sdb logfile

For those who are lost

ddrescue = the utility being run
-v = print the results as the drive is being cloned
-r3 = retry the bad secors or IO portions of the hard drive caused by read errors 3 times
/dev/sdc = location of the source drive (c can be any letter that is associated with the source drive)
/dev/sdb = location of the target drive (c can be any letter that is associated with the target drive)
logfile = used by ddrescue as a reference so that if the cloning process is stopped or interrupted, you can begin where it left off.

Finally, one of the great things about ddrescue is that instead of aborting the cloning process or forcing you to continue after it finds an error, it marks those sections, gets what ever data it can, slits the blocks and tries again. In other words, its all automated and it keeps retrying until it cannot possibly get any more information or until you specify otherwise.

 

[joydivision]

Never cloned a drive when doing repaclements before, I always clone for backup purpoases (so I can't be accused of missing something) but I always then start a clean installation on the new drive and copy the data back from the clone.

However I have a Sony in now, the customer has no back up discs so I may attempt to clone it, the problem is it doesn't currently boot due to a corrupt registery so have to fix that first .

I am quite and there is the danger of me going a bit too far out of my way to get the job done for the original quote (e.g without the cost of Sony suppying the new CD).

 

[smashedbotatos]

If I can't clone it I make the customer order the recovery disks. If you clone it and recovery partitions still work you are set, but in some cases it will not.

I won't leave a customer with out a recovery partition or a disk to reinstall the OS, and you can't just hand them a Win disk when you are done.

Factory recovery disks are always the way to go if the clone won't work. Unless it is an OEM version on a custom built laptop or desktop.

 

[frase]

Best point of action I follow -

Full system Image (regardless if customer asked] stored on non networked system for a 1 month period then removed

Backup Outlook .pst and .data files
Backup manually User profiles

NUKE & PAVE - system

intall fresh os/updates etc
Synch these files to next new image if required and backed up incremently at a certain scheduled time/date.