How to Clone a Hard Drive With Bad Sectors Using ddrescue

[Jared]

If you ddrescue a 500Gb drive onto a 1Tb, you'll be left with 500Gb of old data at the end. It's best to either start with a zero filled blank drive or at least set the scan area to the lba size of the original drive you imaged.

Did ddrescue seem to actually image the data, or did it just error out on everything?

 

[jimmy5]

i cant really remember how ddrescue ended(i might have even ended it myself to save it from damage), but the only data that i saw from the scanned image was from 2009-2012 or something... and nothing from 2015 or 2016...
but i also have a short mapfile of the ddrescue scan, so it should have saved atleast something on the image? which i did not see at all...

 

[CarmonMode]

Jared, Hats off to you.

You helped me a lot in this post.

Regards,
Carmon Mode
http://www.o365cloudexperts.com/

 

[adsrawson]

Thanks for this tutorial,

Is it possible to clone just 400gb of a 2tb drive onto another 2tb drive that already has some data on it without losing that data?

Thanks

 

[pclab]

Is the patient drive OK?
If yes, you can directly copy the selected data.
If you want to image/clone, it's better to save the data from donor HDD, because you will loose it.

 

[adsrawson]

Thanks for the fast reply,

The drive with the 400gb of data I want to copy is on a HD that is failing (bad sectors). I want to save as mucin data as possible but only have 2 smaller SSD's and another identical 2tb drive (but this has programs/data on I'd rather not have to reinstall).

I'm guessing the failing drive is the 'patient drive' as you say, so presumably I'll need a fresh HD of 2tb or more to save any data I can?

 

[pclab]

Yeah, you should get a new drive.

 

[NNenov]

A long time ago, I had an important hard disk fail on me, it was making bad sounds, I followed an online walkthrough on using DDrescue to clone the damaged drive perfectly. I've now had another failure and I can't find that walkthrough anymore.. but this looks great, I just have some questions before I can try to follow;

- The original walkthrough I followed, required 2 new hard disks, one to "image"(I think that was the term) the damaged drive to, and the second to clone/image the image to and create a proper clone on.

I only have one blank hard disk available at the moment, it is 2TB SSD/HD hybrid drive;
I dont quite get exactly what you are explaining, is it:
a. how to create an "image" file to the new drive, which then needs to be further processed before being imaged onto a new drive, basically moving it to a healthy body
or
b. is it explaining how to clone the damaged drive directly to a new drive, but without the bad sectors?

if the case is a, can I still do this with my single 2TB drive, by partitioning it in windows prior to the operation? if I did this, would it read as 2 separate drives when calling "hwinfo --short" and is it an issue that my new drive is a "hybrid" drive?

 

[lcoughey]

You need not make an image and a drive-to-drive clone...one should suffice. If going drive-to-drive, the destination drive must be the exact same sector size or larger. If going drive to image, the formatted partition on the destination drive must be large enough to hold the full capacity of the source drive in an image file. How big is the source drive?

While we are at it, what is the model and problem with the source drive too?

 

[NNenov]

Thank you for the fast response, the troubled drive is a "repaired" (old) seagate 500gb baracuda 7200rpm.
It makes some strange sounds, sometimes boots if the computer has been turned off, but fails soon after boot and disappears from My Computer.
The new drive I got is
"2TB Seagate ST2000DX002 3.5" FireCuda, SSHD, 8GB cMLC NAND, SATA III - 6Gb/s, 7200rpm, 64MB Cache, OEM"

I am tempted to do a direct drive to drive operation, but if I do this, it would mean I should avoid using -r (repeated attempts) since this may kill the drive if it is really damaged, and it seems it would be safer to use an image and do just 1 pass, once I have the image I can do -r3 without worrying about the drive dying. Is this right? if this is the better option then I am again not sure if I can partition my new drive and how imaging and cloning would work.