Trying to clone a dying drive

E

evt

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 6, 2006
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Trying to clone a dying drive
The laptop drive went tits up, showing a sizable amount of reallocated sectors in SMART.

It has gotten to a point where it can boot to windows fine, but you cannot use Windows Explorer to look at the drive or even open folders, as the drive would click furiously and explorer will automatically force quit and restart.

I had Acronis TrueImage installed on the laptop already, so I plugged in an external usb drive, set the program to ignore read errors and proceeded to image the drive. The imaging had gone smooth up to a certain point (95% done) where the program would just hang without doing anything and no drive activity (unless I actively tried to open applications/files), it would not budge, no matter how long I waited but it allowed me to cancel the operation.

I tried another way, using a Knoppix BootCD to just try to copy the files via drag&drop since I dont have prior experience with linux, I dont know of any other way to recover files. Unfortunately, at random times, the OS would either refuse to read the files, hang while reading/copying the files, or just completely hard lock the whole computer.

Then I hooked up the laptop drive into my desktop computer, Acronis TrueImage failed with the same issue and DriveImageXML would just hang on detecting drives.

Is there any other way of imaging the drive?
 
Is there a possibility its crapping out at the end for mechanical reasons? I would try the freezer trick too. But keep it covered as much as possible in a plastic bag even for the first minute when you start to run it especially if you live anywhere with even moderate humidity. You don't need a film of water to form on the interior. I don't think that'll help.
 
Hmm, wonder if you just tried keeping the laptop chilled? Keeping it in a fridge and letting the drive stay cool during the entire copy process. I'd remove the battery as Li-ION don't like to get cold.
 
Danny Bui said:
Using Knoppix, try using the DD command. This link might help:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/learn-the-dd-command-362506/
Click to expand...

If you try the Knoppix route, I'd really suggest using dd_rescue since there is a bad drive around:

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Dd_rescue

A little story about recovery using dd_rescue and the freezer trick mentioned:
http://paulski.com/zpages.php?id=1913

dd_rescue is a utility I started using to recover Tivo drives, but I know from experience it can appear to perform miracles. Unlike dd in noerror mode which will skip the whole block size you have specified, dd_rescue will decrease it's block size when it hits an error to try to recover as much data as possible.

Apparently there is a companion program called dd_rhelp that you might want to take a look at as well.
 
I wouldn't do the freezer trick on that drive.

It's not a mechanical problem and could make it worse.

I'd be trying GetDataBack if the data has any value.

It's not free but it's saved my buns more than once.
 
I am going to do the ddrescue option first, since that seems to have superceeded dd_rescue + dd_rhelp.

This is my command that I have used : ddrescue -v /media/sda5 /media/sdb1/damaged.img
However, it spit out a message that I dont fully understand.
About to copy 16384 Bytes from /media/sda5 to /media/sdb1/damaged.img
Starting positions: infile = 0 B, outfile = 0 B
Copy block size: 128 hard blocks
Hard block size: 512 bytes
Max_retries: 0
Direct: no Sparse: no Split: yes Truncate: no

Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
rescued: 0 B, errsize: 16384 B, current rate: 0 B/s
ipos: 15360 B, errors: 1, average rate: 0 B/s
opos: 15360 B
Finished


Anyone have any idea what is wrong? I am able to still able to browse sda5 and open some files in linux.
 
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