[SOLVED] Urgent Question about Failing Hard Drive

[LedHed]

Okay, so here is the situation. I have a Dell Precision laptop in my shop. It has one of those Seagate SSHD (Hybrid) drives. The drive is failing and I am imaging it using DDRescue right now. My question is this, does anyone know if this image can be transferred to a traditional (non-SSHD) hard drive?

I want to be very clear here, this is NOT an SSD drive. It is a hybrid drive.

It is running Windows 8.1 and it has 8 gigs of RAM, if you're curious. If anyone has any experience with this, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

Thank you in advance,
Andy

 

[Larry Sabo]

I would expect so, since you're imaging the data that's on the platters with the solid state part just acting as a large cache to access it. Luke at RecoveryForce will know for sure.

 

[Markverhyden]

If BIOS presents the hybrid drive as one device I don't see why not. At any rate I'd just do it. Can't damage anything since the image is still there.

 

[300DDR]

^Yup, what they said.

 

[coffee]

Just remember that if your imaging the whole drive at once (just one big image file) then you will not be able to mount it. Your option is only to image it to the same size or bigger drive.

Alot of times I will do seperate imaging for example : /dev/sda1 (100 MB boot partition), Then /dev/sda2 (actual data partition). Then if you need to mount /dev/sda2 to recover files you can.

 

[300DDR]

Also should note: sometimes the media cache is corrupt and needs to be disabled. But, if you are able to start imaging and it's working quickly, should be fine.

 

[Larry Sabo]

Just remember that if your imaging the whole drive at once (just one big image file) then you will not be able to mount it.

Huh?

 

[LedHed]

Thank you all for the input so far (still backing up), with a special thank you to Larry and Mark. I guess my main concern is with the 8 GB cache partition. I'm not entirely sure how it works. For example, since the new standard drive doesn't have an 8 GB SSD cache, will deleting this partition make the drive unbootable? I understand that this is an unusual situation but this is the first time I've worked on a hybrid drive.

If any of you are wondering, I promise to post my results for future reference. Should know something in a few hours.

Andy

 

[Larry Sabo]

Sorry, Andy, I don't know. About all you can do is try it and see if it boots. If not, I guess you'd have to buy a hybrid drive identical to the patient and see if then boots. I would just extract the user data from the data partition and copy it to the data partition of a conventional drive before I'd buy a new hybrid drive--or anything else from Seagate. You could try mounting the image in a VM and see if that boots.

 

[phaZed]

The "Hybrid" part of the drive is only going to be an image (a duplicate) of the most commonly accessed things on the hard drive. There should be no "important data" contained on the SSD part of the SSHD. Everything you should need will be contained on the HDD.

Just remember that if your imaging the whole drive at once (just one big image file) then you will not be able to mount it. Your option is only to image it to the same size or bigger drive.

Simply not so. I use kpartx (in linux) to mount full drive images then you can use the standard "mount" command on those partitions.
http://forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mounting_Disk_Images

 

[LedHed]

Okay. I finally got the DDRescue image from the SSHD to the replacement hard drive. From what I can tell, DDRescue didn't see the SSD cache at all. What I thought was the cache was just the recovery partition. I replaced the original 500 GB SSHD drive with a standard 750 GB hard drive. Of course, I had to move/resize some partitions but it seems to be working just fine.

Thank you all for your advice/input.
Andy

p.s. I would like to mark this as "Solved" but I'm not sure how.

 

[Markverhyden]

Great to hear. You can edit the Title using Thread Tools at the top.

 

[texson]

Interesting. Have not had that problem yet, but now I know.

 

[coffee]

The "Hybrid" part of the drive is only going to be an image (a duplicate) of the most commonly accessed things on the hard drive. There should be no "important data" contained on the SSD part of the SSHD. Everything you should need will be contained on the HDD.



Simply not so. I use kpartx (in linux) to mount full drive images then you can use the standard "mount" command on those partitions.
http://forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mounting_Disk_Images

I will relook into this hopefully sunday to see. I will 'DD' up and see. Feel bad if I accidently got it wrong. My appologies.

 

[coffee]

The "Hybrid" part of the drive is only going to be an image (a duplicate) of the most commonly accessed things on the hard drive. There should be no "important data" contained on the SSD part of the SSHD. Everything you should need will be contained on the HDD.



Simply not so. I use kpartx (in linux) to mount full drive images then you can use the standard "mount" command on those partitions.
http://forensicswiki.org/wiki/Mounting_Disk_Images

Lets say you have a drive with 2 partitions on it. You want to back up the drive or clone it to another drive. If your going to clone it to another drive you can use the command line: dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb - Assuming drive A is the drive you want to clone.

However, If you want to make a iso /img file of the drive and then mount it and pull files off of it then you have to do it a different way. Reason being is you cannot mount an image of multiple partitions

Example: dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/testdrive/myimagefile.iso

When you go to mount the image file to look at the files then linux will complain about not recognizing the filesystem.

Assuming /dev/sda1 is your boot partition and /dev/sda2 is your filesystem then you would want to do this:

dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/mnt/testdrive/myimagefile.iso

What I was trying to explain in my last post is do not make the mistake of making a full image of the drive and expect to mount it and pull files from it if you need to for some reason. As per just cloning to another drive the iso will work but not for mounting because you have more than one partition in the iso.

 

[Larry Sabo]

Reason being is you cannot mount an image of multiple partitions

The ISO created using ddrescue can easily be mounted using OSFMount, which normally results in each partition being given a drive letter from which you can recover/copy files, e.g., using Fabs. That's why I replied "Huh?" earlier.

 

[coffee]

The ISO created using ddrescue can easily be mounted using OSFMount, which normally results in each partition being given a drive letter from which you can recover/copy files, e.g., using Fabs. That's why I replied "Huh?" earlier.

Just checked that out. In a windows enviroment. However, In linux it will probably be different. My original comment was just that - a comment.

ddrescue does not run on windows as far as I know and OSFMount does not run on linux.

Thanks for your reply

 

[Larry Sabo]

I'm totally ignorant when it comes to Linux (and many other things) but I'm surprised it's not possible to mount an ISO and scan for/mount partitions embedded within it. I'm not being a smart aleck, just expressing my surprise (and betraying my ignorance).

Edit: Does this article help?

 

[Markverhyden]

You can mount an ISO in Linux. It's just that Linux treats files differently than Windoze You have to mount the image as well as assign it to a mount point. Windoze does that automatically just like OS X. To be honest I never image a drive to an ISO. I only do it to an .img file. And it's easy to convert one to another.

 

[lcoughey]

Sorry for being late to the game. Looks like the OP is already answered. But if I were to add to it, it would be that sshd is like using a USB thumb drive for speed boost in Windows.

It is easy to work with dd images in Linux once you understand how to set it up as a loopback device.