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whaevr

Member

Registered: 2008-03-17

Posts: 182

Need to backup NTFS drive with bad sectors and restore to new drive

So far what I've tried is downloading clonezilla and I've tried a drive to drive clone, what this resulted in was the new drive thinking it had bad sectors just like the old. SO since each time I attempt this it eats 2-3 hours of my time and I have to leave soon to go back to school, I don't exactly have all the time in the world; what is the recommended course of action here?

What i've been reading up on is possibly doing a clone to image file? From what I understand a clone to image will not copy over bad sectors (there is very small amount in this drive at this time, not worried about a massive amount of corrupted files)  and instead just leaves the files that existed in the sectors corrupted on the new drive. Is this true? How do I go about this correctly so I can successfully re-image to my new drive?

Would like to note I'm trying to backup the entire DRIVE, not just the main partition, boot sector and all.

edit:
Before anyone suggests running chkdsk /r /f in windows I've done this, partition is still giving me reports of bad sectors. This gives me the idea this drive is on its way out and I'm trying to limit my attempts at cloning the entire thing at this point so I dont further my problem, someone has had to have delt with this before?

Last edited by whaevr (2014-02-10 00:14:33)

hezekiah

Member

From: US-East

Registered: 2014-02-08

Posts: 6

Re: Need to backup NTFS drive with bad sectors and restore to new drive

I've had good success with dd_rescue in the past. The default behavior of dd_rescue is to skip sectors it cannot read (see the man page for a more precise explanation of its behavior). However, it's fairly simple minded, and requires manual intervention if you want to try to maximize the amount of data you recover.

It seems the new hotness is ddrescue, a gnu project apart from dd_rescue which provides a number of improvements. Most notably, It seems to imbue dd_rescue with greater levels of sophistication to make it capable of recovering more data with greater levels of efficiency, reducing strain on the failing drive.

If I were to recover a drive now, I'd probably give ddrescue a whirl.

Hope this helps.

Last edited by hezekiah (2014-02-10 04:28:19)

emeres

Member

Registered: 2013-10-08

Posts: 1,570

Re: Need to backup NTFS drive with bad sectors and restore to new drive

Depending on your hard drives manufacturer/model, there could be tools available for low level recovery/tuning on support site. Running S.M.A.R.T. checks, tuning settings and searching for bad sectors using manufacturers tools usually gets better results. Then it may be easier to recovery with other tools. If your hard drive is failing, reduce power up and down cycles as much as possible (if hdd powers up, keep it running), also use low to moderate temperature environment.