• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Possible to clone a hard drive?

  • Thread starter Deleted member 72990
  • Start date
D

Deleted member 72990

Guest
I need to replace a failing hard drive in a computer. Data appears to still all be intact, except the drive is making a clicking noise and I'm sure its about to die. Is this possible without reinstalling windows? Thanks!
 
bjornb17 said:
I need to replace a failing hard drive in a computer. Data appears to still all be intact, except the drive is making a clicking noise and I'm sure its about to die. Is this possible without reinstalling windows? Thanks!
Click to expand...

put it in another machine and start copying, or download hdd clone and clone the drive to another drive..
 
If you're comfortable using a Linux LiveCD, you can use DD to clone your disks...

"dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb"

Assuming the disk you're cloning is sda, and the disk you're writing to is sdb.
 
Keep in mind something like 'dd' will only work if the two drives are the same exact size...
 
danswartz said:
Keep in mind something like 'dd' will only work if the two drives are the same exact size...
Click to expand...

I've used dd before with different sized drives :confused: It was within Virtualbox though, so technically it was *.vdi's, not physical drives, but should it make a difference?
 
Well, sure. If you're copying to a smaller drive, the partition table will be invalid on the new drive (it will describe blocks that do not exist.) I suppose you could copy to a larger drive, but you'd waste the extra space. All that aside, a dd block by block copy is wasteful, since it copies everything, even blocks that are not in use. A ghost-style utility like clonezilla will only copy the in-use data (since it understands most filesystem types.) I don't think it groks zfs but pretty much any windows-used fs yes.
 
You can use dd to copy a drive to the same size or larger. I have done the latter quite a few times at work. Then used some tool to extend the last partition.

With that said for this operation I prefer ddrescue. Since the OP said the drive was failing. The nice thing about ddrescue is it tries to recover as much of the source drive as possible without checking the filesystem structures or failing for any reason except for the case where the drive can not read any more sectors.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top