Program to clone a failing hard drive

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computerdoc

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A customer gave me a Gateway ML6714 laptop with a failing hard drive. It initially fails to boot and warns that the drive has failed SMART testing and should be replaced (reallocated sector count). Its a MD1600BEVS 160 gb drive which I am replacing with a MD3200BEVT 320 gb drive.

I was considering using rawcopy under UBCDwin. What is the best program to clone the hard drive from the old drive to the new drive.
 
What is the advantage of ddrescue over clonezilla, Acronis or Paragon?

Although I am basically familiar with Linux, it would still be a bit of a learning curve/
 
Acronis, Clonezilla, ect ect have options to ignore sectors they fail to read, which CAN be detrimental to the effectiveness of a clone.

DDrescue does not "skip" or "0 out" failed reads, it makes an effort to fill the gaps with what should be there. It's also generally better at the job :)

Also, linux knowledge requirement is minimal, I'm pretty sure any recent build has a full GUI anyway.
 
If I boot off a Linux cd and I am restoring the built in drive to a usb drive, where does the logfile get written to?
 
computerdoc said:
If I boot off a Linux cd and I am restoring the built in drive to a usb drive, where does the logfile get written to?
Click to expand...

It depends. If you are using a live CD, you must specify the location of the logfile in terms that the live environment can recognize and has write access to. For instance, you can mount a flash drive and store it there (Parted Magic usually mounts usb drives in /media) or you could specify a location on another disk, as long as it is mounted and accessible from your live environment.

Usually, I run ddrescue from my linux-based test bench computer with both drives connected natively (SATA or PATA), and clone the failing drive to the new drive. I usually just store the logfile in my home directory. So my ddrescue command looks something like this
Code: 
# ddrescue -f -d -r3 /dev/sdx /dev/sdy ~/logfile
Make sure you are certain about the names of your devices! ddrescue is a powerful tool, and can cause undesired consequences should you get this wrong.
 
I didn't find ddrescue on the gparted cd.

If I wanted to clone disk a to disk b and put the logfile on flash drive c, what would be the command syntax?
 
I've been following this thread, and I needed to clone a drive with reallocated sectors. It wasn't too serious a problem, but the first time I ran Acronis True Image, it failed.

I checked the option to have it ignore errors; it completed just fine and it looks like the clone is perfect!!!

Here's what I did:

- Installed onto the computer the free Western Digital version of Acronis True Image, available on WD's website.

- Attached the new drive to the computer via USB to SATA adapter.

- Formatted it & created a simple volume.

- Checked the option within acronis to ignore disk errors.

- Went through about 4 steps to identify the source, destination disk, etc.

- Let it sit & do it's thing, took maybe 45 min. for a drive with 70GB of actual usage including OS.

- Removed old drive, installed the new one.

- Machine booted right up into windows, prompted me to reboot once.

- DONE. WOW. No command line, no fussing with making a partition active/primary; NOTHING. Just pop it in & go...THAT'S what I'm talking about!

Your situation sounds like the drive might be a little worse off, so if I were you I'd copy off the documents/pictures first before trying to clone it, but that's just me.

Just thought I'd share my experience in case it's useful to anyone...
 
I actually tried Acronis off a copy that I have which I used from a boot disk that I created from Acronis. It wouldn't let me use the new drive as the target.

I initially did a quick format but Acronis tech support said it had to be fully formatted. Turns out that the new drive was actually bad so now I'm waiting for a replacement target drive.
 
I have had great success with Easeus todo workstation. I have cloned numerous failing hard drives with it.
 
Ultimately the problem here is that all conventional software-based disk cloning solutions simply skip bad sectors. Sometimes you'll get lucky and the data that's skipped/unreadable isn't anything critical, but if something important is in one of those areas, you're in for a world of hurt. Worse yet, if the drive happens to give up the ghost during the heavy imaging read commands, all is lost and the price tag of recovery skyrockets.

ddrescue is a bit different because it does what some of the hardware imagers do to the best of its ability as a limited software solution for DIY data recovery. That is, it returns upon subsequent read passes to attempt to collect data in troubled areas in reverse. Of course, it's still comparably limited in its abilities when compared to full-blown solutions like the DeepSpar simply because A) it cannot power control the drive (to deal with situations of read instability when the drive repeatedly dies or fails to read) and B) it doesn't have as much control over other drive features such as Read Ignoring ECC and the disabling of heavy processes such as SMART.

So anyway, what I'm saying is that at the very least, the solution should be one which can perform multiple passes at the data. But if it's really valuable to the customer, there is no other solution than a hardware imager or a data recovery company.
 
Yeah OK ... I want to ask a stupid question

(not that that ever stopped me before!) :)

What are you guys thoughts on using DDrescue with disk connected by USB instead of sata/ide?

Important for best data recovery result to use native connector or no?

..
 
16k_zx81 said:
Yeah OK ... I want to ask a stupid question

(not that that ever stopped me before!) :)

What are you guys thoughts on using DDrescue with disk connected by USB instead of sata/ide?

Important for best data recovery result to use native connector or no?

..
Click to expand...

I've heard its always best to use its native interface over usb when its failing.
 
16k_zx81 said:
Yeah OK ... I want to ask a stupid question

(not that that ever stopped me before!) :)

What are you guys thoughts on using DDrescue with disk connected by USB instead of sata/ide?

Important for best data recovery result to use native connector or no?

..
Click to expand...
If the drive is failing, you want to use a hardware imaging solution that is going to allow you to avoid the damaged areas and focus on the good areas of the drive and, at the same time, get the drive cloned as fast as possible.

As for a stable drive with software tools, USB vs SATA/IDE makes no difference with the quality of the clone. You will just be limited to the speed of the connection. Sometimes, USB is better in the way that if you do need to repower the drive, you need not reboot the system to make that happen.
 
ddrescue under parted magic worked great. It recovered 120 gb in a couple of hours and reduced 10 megs of bad data to 1 mb. The 320 gb drive is working well in place of the 120 in the laptop.

Thanks for all the info and help.
 
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