Replacing failing drive... hitting a brick wall

[DocGreen]

Customer brought me a laptop with a hard drive that I'd previously diagnosed as failing. It's developing significant amounts of corruption and the customer is finally able to replace it.

So I went to image the old drive to the new drive first thinking it would be better to deal with the corruption afterwards... ran into issues imaging with clonezilla. Finally got the disc to image over by doing a sector-by-sector image.

The new drive is 2x the size of the original, but it wouldn't allow me to expand the partition until the corruption was dealt with. OK, fine.

I've run chkdsk about 10 times now, and each time (and no matter how I run it) the process always hangs after stage 2. The last message displayed is "Index Verification Complete." It does this even when it's not fixed any damage. Here are the results of stage 1 as currently displayed (for the umpteenth time) on my screen:

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
8614656 file records processed.
File verification completed.
405 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
0 EA records processed.
44 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
8664928 index entries processed.
Index Verification completed.


The HDD indicator LED is on almost steadily, so it's definitely doing something... but it's been stuck at this point for probably an hour now with no indication of what is going on. ***EDIT*** Just looked... the drive LED has stopped flashing and is solid off now. No change on the screen.


Finally so I feel like I'm trying something new to move this process along, I've hooked the original drive up in another computer and am about to begin running CHKDSK on it to see if I have any better results... maybe it would be easier to clean up the corruption on the original drive first before cloning it. I'm just concerned that the more this drive is used, the more corruption will occur. **EDIT** No joy running chkdsk on the original HDD... it won't even run.


Advice?

 

[Kitten Kong]

Hi doc, could you not slave the dive, data transfer all clients info, and do a fresh install on the new drive?.

Surely this would be quicker than all the messing around with file corruption etc.

 

[DocGreen]

I could... but I only charged the customer for a new HDD install and a data migration to the new drive. I'll want to talk to the customer in the morning before I do anything other than repair the existing data.

On the bright side, it appears that the recovery partition was undamaged. Once I get the go-ahead from the customer I shouldn't have any problems doing a factory recovery.

 

[DocGreen]

The corruption has really gotten worse on this drive over the past few weeks since I'd seen it last... last time I had it I was able to clean it all up with a couple passes of CHKDSK. This time, not so lucky. I did warn her that it would only get worse the longer she waited.

 

[xpert71]

hi!before use clonezzilla make a hdd regeneration with hdd regenerator.this probram will regenerate all the bad sectors on the bad hard disk .after this u may be able to make a clone without problems.the regeneration process could take some time .

if regeneration failed use partition tools to copy just the recovery partition to the new hard disk.make the recovery partion active and boot into recovery mode.

i resolve same situation 2 days ago.

 

[DocGreen]

if regeneration failed use partition tools to copy just the recovery partition to the new hard disk.make the recovery partion active and boot into recovery mode.

I was able to copy the recovery partition over without any issues. I just contacted the customer to let them know that the original plan failed and that we're moving on to the factory restore.


I suppose it's for the best... with the upgraded HDD her computer will be better than new. I just hate having to wipe out a customer's programs.

 

[AlaDes]

hi!before use clonezzilla make a hdd regeneration with hdd regenerator.this probram will regenerate all the bad sectors on the bad hard disk .after this u may be able to make a clone without problems.the regeneration process could take some time .

Since you already have the data backed up, I'd probably give this a try as well. Also, I would try imaging the drive using imagex because it only gets the file structure and doesn't worry about partition information. Once the drive is imaged this way, apply the image to the new drive and try running an sfc scan to fix any damaged files.