Imaging a failing drive.... HELP?

[Jambo Dave]

Hi,

 

My laptop drive has started making a terrible noise, I would like to copy(image?) the entire failing drive to a replacement drive temporarily housed in a USB caddy, and then swap the drives, and hopefully avoid disaster. Is this a realistic option ?

 

Can anybody suggest what application I need to run to do this copy(image?) and is it as simple as this or are there some possible problems I'm not aware of.

 

thanks for any advice

[BeeCeeBee]

I have had good success with Acronis True Image. I know that there are some who prefer others but I do not judge by anything other than the fact that I have not only used it for back up but have fully restored one machine using it. The bottom line is that it works.

You need to be certain that you enable the Startup Recovery Manager rather than rely on Rescue media. You will get it as an option for a few seconds every time you boot and before it starts loading windows. Very reassuring.

 

One thing I am not sure about is exactly how you would go about restoring the system if the external drive where the image is stored becomes the C drive when you try to restore. It is a matter of settings I am sure. If the drive has not totally failed you may want to make a second image on the failing drive and, if it hasn't totally failed, swap the positions and recover from that 2nd image.

 

Truthfully that may be overkill but it may make things a bit easier. I am sure there are others who will give better advice on settings but I do know that Acronis has worked without a hitch.

[Tootech]

I tried imaging failing drives with TrueImage 9 and had a little success, although you have to remember to tag the box to ignore errors.

 

It does depend on the faults though, any hint of trouble and it will stop.

 

A better method IMHO is to use dd_rescue from a bootable Knoppix CD.

 

If you don't want to use Linux, the other tool that works well is Paraben's Forensic Replicator.

 

Paraben Forensics

 

You can use it as a trial and it will image a full drive, again tell it to ignore errors. I have had a lot of success with this one, but only running from XP - there seems to issues with drive protection on Vista and 7.

 

Paraben also can save the image as a file, then when complete you can open the image and extract data - a very nice touch.

[HobGoblin]

CloneZilla

[Tootech]

Taken from Clonezilla FAQ

 

Normally when you see messages like:

hda: possible failed opcode: 0xc8

dma_instr: status=0x41 { DriveReady Error }

hda: task_pio_intr: status=0x49 { DriveReady DataRequest Error }

io_all: errno = Input/output error(5)

It means that your hard drive has hardware issues, e.g. bad blocks. You'd better to copy important data before you continue to use it. If you want to use Clonezilla to save the image, you can try to enter expert mode, choose "-q2" and "-rescue" (the rest of options can be default ones) so that it can use the rescue mode of partclone to save the image for you. However, this does not mean it always work. Good luck!

 

Not such a good tool for a failing drive IMHO