Please advise if it’s possible to clone a failing harddrive. I tried Clonezilla Live, on the first run, the cloning started by 3-5 minutes into the cloning, the process stopped because of some errors it encountered (Source HDD). On the second run, later the sameday, it didn’t even initiate the clone process, and kept getting I/O Error with 129.780983, etc. (This number used as example), and a whole host of other series of numbers like that.
So what are my options? Cloning is sort of important, to avoid the pain of reinstalling everything. Are there any other DIY options at this point? What if I try to create an Image instead of Disk to Disk cloning?
Thanks all.
If cloning is a no-go at this point in your expert opinion(s), is there anyway at all to port installed programs and associated data over to new HDD?
Put the drive in a ziplock bag and put it in the freezer for 24 hours. Then take it out and copy paste important document.
Then mount the drive on a computer and use SpinRite (GRC | Hard drive data recovery software ) on setting 4 and let it run till things are resolved. then do a clone and you’re all set.
You may have done this already but a very simple nuskha that may or may not work. Attach the drive as a non-boot drive, like a secondary drive. Go to the command prompt, go to the hard-disk's drive and run "chkdsk /r". This can take up to an hour. Once complete, try cloning it again.
If that fails do what Tofi said, except try a filecopy first before freezing the hdd.
Cloning won't be easy from a system that have bad sectors in its hard drive. The reason being that it copy sector by sector, and if it couldn't read one then it fails with an IO exception.
As a future reference start using VMs and keep a copy of good install. The other thing you can look in to is to start using SSDs.
Will try all those suggestions, and see how it goes. At this point, I have semi-resigned to the fact that cloning might not be possible. Also exploring other possibilities to port over programs, otherwise will have to go clean install (last resort).