How to replace a failing laptop hdd with a cloned hdd?

LeperKing

Hi folks,

I'm been given a relatives laptop whos been complaining of slow performace. On first inspection the hdd is making a loud clicking sound, and the system takes a inordinate amount of time booting, and general windows operations are very slow. I'm concluding that the hdd is just on its way out, and want to replace the drive with a new one, while retaining a exact image of what was there beforehand.

I've never done this before, so there's a few things I need to know before starting the work..

1) Wll the vista installation have a licencing issue if it can tell that its on a different model of hdd?
2) The hdd I'm replacing is an ata-7 drive., what would be best physical way to clone old hdd (with two partitions) and copy to new bigger hdd?
3) I know Ghost would have been a popular choice a few years ago. Is this still the case, or is there a free alternative?
4) Should I get an ata-usb drive adapter?

Thanks,
LK.

chin_grin

http://lifehacker.com/400615/easeus-disk-copy-makes-a-fast-clone-of-your-hard-drive ?

Never cloned before, usually turn to google and lifehacker for problems like these. Hope that helps!

jbloggs

You need something like This to plug the new 2.5" IDE HDD into and connect it to USB of laptop, I would use the trial version of Acronis True Image Home 2010 to do the actual clone, once the clone had been done onto the new HDD, the laptop will power down, simply remove the new HDD from Plexus USB device, remove old HDD from laptop and fit new one and power on...job done!

Wll the vista installation have a licencing issue if it can tell that its on a different model of hdd?

There should be no problems, you "may" have to reactivate it, but that would be all...

ricman

See here clonezilla, info, free hd clone http://revision3.com/tekzilla/ghost
.USE driver max prog, free to backup your mobo, drivers just in case .

10-10-20

I had a similar issue a couple of months back.
I used Ghost for Linux (http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l/) to upload the image onto an FTP site (server upstairs) and then replaced the drive and blasted the image back down again.
Worked a treat in my case, but often with clicking hard-drives, they die when you start the data copy.

Capt'n Midnight

ddrescue from a live CD , if all goes well then it will have very few seeks so should be easier on the drive, it will retry bad sectors later, which most other cloning apps fail on


best done in a desktop since copying will be faster than to a USB drive , and you want to get the done asap


must dig out a cheat sheet for it sometime

backup the important data first then do the cloning

unnameduser

snapshot is a free alternative that works quite well. Hopefully the drive will last long enough for the cloning process to finish. Certainly sounds like its gonna fail

LeperKing

Just as an update on my efforts; I've tried snapshot and acronis to image the bad drive, both have failed to make an image due to errors on the disk.

So I have managed to copy the "Users" folder on the vista pastition, and have used the laptop accompaning recovery cd to get a working windows installation on the new drive.

But I'm trying to figure out if I can get the windows/user settings from the old hard drive. "Windows Easy Transfer" does seem to be the best option but it goes into blue screen when running in the old hard drive windows enviroment.

Is there any way to use WET to transfer windows settings not from the present OS that the WET is working in but from an external usb harddrive (ie the old failing harddrive)?

Thanks,
LK.

ricman

TRY using wet, in f8 , windows safe mode, i would bother using wet,as you are gonna prbly have to reinstall programs if the image file is not working.
YOU could copy, favorites,pictures, mp3s to a usb drive .

Capt'n Midnight

If the drive is failing then ddrescue or ntbackup to grab as much as you can
ntbackup will dumbly carry on when most cloning apps fail (and because it only backups up files it won't care about bad sectors in free areas)
if it's blue screening then ntbackup ain't much use

ddrescue = ubuntu live cd
internet connection
sudo apt-get install gddrescue


the syntax is something like this to copy from hda to hdb
ddrescue /dev/hda /dev/hdb logfile

if worried about wiping hdb then copy to an image file which can be mounted or photorec later on
ddrescue /dev/hda imagefile logfile

LeperKing

ricman wrote: »

TRY using wet, in f8 , windows safe mode, i would bother using wet,as you are gonna prbly have to reinstall programs if the image file is not working.
YOU could copy, favorites,pictures, mp3s to a usb drive .

Vista won't let me run WET in safe mode.

LeperKing

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If the drive is failing then ddrescue or ntbackup to grab as much as you can
ntbackup will dumbly carry on when most cloning apps fail (and because it only backups up files it won't care about bad sectors in free areas)
if it's blue screening then ntbackup ain't much use

ddrescue = ubuntu live cd
internet connection
sudo apt-get install gddrescue


the syntax is something like this to copy from hda to hdb
ddrescue /dev/hda /dev/hdb logfile

if worried about wiping hdb then copy to an image file which can be mounted or photorec later on
ddrescue /dev/hda imagefile logfile

Sorry capt I'm not vell versed with linux. From what you're telling me, I should do the following?

I have at the moment, a laptop, a bad hard drive, a new hard drive and a usb-ata hard drive dock.

1. Obtain a ubuntu live cd. Is there an exact file name you can recommend?
2. Bootup with live CD on laptop with failing hard drive installed.
3. Ensure theres an internet connection? Do I just need to have the ethernet connection plugged in to a DHCP serving router?
4. Run> sudo apt-get install gddrescue. Will this save to the hardrive because I'm running a live CD?
5. ddrescue /dev/hda dev/hdb logfile Which is hda and hdb?
6. Or else ddrescue /dev/hda imagefile logfile. How can I avoid placing the image in the bad harddrive?

Thanks for help,
LK.

Capt'n Midnight

am leaving this here in case someone looks for it later

your best bet is to try to look in the hidden c:\system volume information
folder as in it may be snapshots of previous system restores, which you can use to replace registry files, - very kill or cure stuff - you should already have them on the target drive.


Cloning info - one day I'll do a sticky

There are two types of hard drive,
A - those that will fail in the future
B - those that have already failed

your drive is a little from column A and a little from column B
the reason this thread is still on windows is that you will be needing to repair / reinstall windows after the data recovery attempt.

you are into data recovery , it may / may not work
how much do you value your time ? - if you have the data reinstalling windows on the new drive is probably quicker, and most likely you would have to reinstall windows on the new drive anyway since the original HDD has hardware problems

at this stage it's more about learning than recovering data - but you might get lucky


it's very similar to dos/windows - if you've used the command line before
you've already copied stuff from the drive so nothing to loose

this step is between easy and paying several hundred to get data copied professionally , again how much do you value your time / how valuable is the missing data

download CD from ubuntu.com 700MB
use a utility to burn cd imag - your existing CD software should be able to cope, right click on the file and see if it gives an option to burn to CD - if not cdburnerxp pro or some such

If you have a 1GB usb key then you can make an image to it , but not as easy and the dead pc has to support usb boot

plug the laptop into a network cable connected to internet box
boot from the CD - usually press F12 to get the boot menu
press enter to try ubuntu
press F3 and up arrow and enter to select UK keyboard instead of US
wait 5 minutes while it boots

for main menu ither click on circle or press Alt-F1
and go into places to make sure you can see the drives you want to copy from and to , then names may be different - check the sizes if unsure

from the menu accessories, terminal
on the black screen type
sudo apt-get install gddrescue
if it don't install check the internet cable and try again ( this is a Do not pass GO step )

then type df -h this will list the linux names of the drives and sizes which you need for the next two steps
CD to the destination drive
FixMe
ddrescue with logfile
FixMe

LeperKing

I have dd rescue up and running, for about a week now, and it's still "splitting failed blocks".....

About to copy 60011 MBytes from /dev/sdz to LKfullimage.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
Initial status (read from logfile)
rescued:    59894 MB,  errsize:    117 MB,  errors:    1283
Current status
rescued:    59941 MB,  errsize:  70371 kB,  current rate:        0 B/s
   ipos:   527964 kB,   errors:    1656,    average rate:      326 B/s
   opos:   527964 kB,     time from last successful read:     5.5 m
Splitting failed blocks...

The errsize was originally 228MB!

Is there work meant to be done on the image before committing it to the new hard drive?
If ddrescue finishes the rescue, does that mean it was able to read every bad sector succesfully?

Thanks,
LK.