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Help cloning a failing hard drive

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secallery
2013-06-18
2013-06-24
  • secallery

    secallery - 2013-06-18

    I'm trying to image a hard drive that is slowly failing. It's a Windows XP machine running on a Pentium 5. I'm using the i486 Clonezilla Live. I can get through all the prompts to the copy, but at about 10% I start getting errors that the FAT can't be read. Then I'm told that the folder I'm using is too small and I need to expand the file size. I'm copying from a 40 gig hdd to a 250 gig usb seagate hdd.

    I'm new to linux but this program came highly recommended for imaging. Let me know any information I can provide and please include instructions if it requires any linux commands. Thank you for any help.

     
  • Gronaz

    Gronaz - 2013-06-19

    My story to that kind of issue: some years ago when I was in XP too, I did it with ghost DOS, telling it to ignore errors: so I reached to recover a lot of data. Not telling it to ignore errors ended in clone abort.
    Also, it was a snowy winter, and I had to do the job in the outside to keep the drive the coldest possible (HD in a fridge could help instead).

    Try transpose to CloneZilla (I don't now how to tell it to ignore errors, and even if it is possible)
    Good luck man

     
  • Gronaz

    Gronaz - 2013-06-19

    Secallery, I just discovered in wikipedia (in the dd page) there is a tool called ddrescue that can help you, able to ignore source drive errors.
    As you are new in linux (like I am), the good new for you is here: ddrescue is on your CZ cd/usb. Get it going to "command line" then send a "ddrescue --help" to see the thing.
    Hope for you that you feel comfortable in cloning then swapping the drives/switching in BIOS to restart to the new drive.

    Bye

     

    Last edit: Gronaz 2013-06-19
  • Gronaz

    Gronaz - 2013-06-21

    PS: Or in the end of cloning, instead of managing boot sequence in the BIOS, just power off the PC and unplug the failed source HD before restarting.
    Another PS: maybe this one is not 100% useful, it could help reboot to the new drive if your original XP installation has seen the new empty drive at least once to load any required driver (e.g. if old one is IDE and the new is SATA)

     
  • Fuchs

    Fuchs - 2013-06-24

    It's very difficult. Perhaps a temperature problem of the RAM of your PC or/and of the power supply.

    In your case make at first
    a backup of your important data,
    then a windows XP defragmentation:
    Open My Computer.
    Right-click the local disk volume that you want to defragment, and then click Properties.
    On the Tools tab, click Defragment Now.
    Click Defragment.
    (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314848/en)

    Use clonezilla now in beginner mode for saveparts a NTFS partition e.g. sda2.
    When it's done look for the
    'blkdev.list[.wri]' in the image folder.
    You can open this file with Microsoft Wordpad or Editor. Can you send us this file?

     

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