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My hard drive died last Tuesday, so I've been running recovery ops after work. Got a replacement drive that's bigger than the dead one, used Clonezilla on a USB to do a direct drive-to-drive copy of my old drive. The first partition (Windows installation) copied perfectly, so I have a working boot now. Unfortunately, the second partition is rife with bad sectors. I left it going all night, but stopped it before leaving for work. Three questions: 1) Does Clonezilla automatically format the target drive before cloning? 2) Should I keep at it with Clonezilla, or switch to ddrescue because apparently that's a better utility for this? 3) Afterwards, can I resize my partitions to make use of the bigger space without disturbing my data or installations?
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Sep 25, 2014 02:27
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| # ? May 14, 2024 02:44 |
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toasterwarrior posted:My hard drive died last Tuesday, so I've been running recovery ops after work. Got a replacement drive that's bigger than the dead one, used Clonezilla on a USB to do a direct drive-to-drive copy of my old drive. The first partition (Windows installation) copied perfectly, so I have a working boot now. Unfortunately, the second partition is rife with bad sectors. I left it going all night, but stopped it before leaving for work. Clonezilla does not deal with bad sectors very well. I've never used ddrescue, but something that's better at data recovery than CZ would be much better. Of course some of your data may not be recoverable at all. What version of windows? Later versions of windows include partition tools that may be able to do that (I've not personally tried) or there are also some utilities that can do it as well.
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Sep 25, 2014 02:42
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Zarc posted:Clonezilla does not deal with bad sectors very well. I've never used ddrescue, but something that's better at data recovery than CZ would be much better. Of course some of your data may not be recoverable at all. Yeah, I've resigned myself to the fact that a portion of that data is lost. Still, I'll save what I can. Thanks for the heads-up on CZ; I toggled its repair options on, but the overnight session's results were not encouraging. I got Win7.
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Sep 25, 2014 03:05
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1) Should be a moot point, but it's copying the partitions over so you shouldn't need to do anything else. The unused space will be unformated. 2) ddrescue is the correct answer. 3) Windows 7 can resize partitions (as long as you're not growing C: when there's a D:). Check out Computer Management / Storage / Disk Management. Right click the partition in question and you can grow/shrink/whatever.
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Sep 25, 2014 04:12
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Thanks for the answers. Got ddrescue running right now, and I'm pretty sure it managed to pull out all worthwhile data since it has about 150gb out of 200gb recovered. Everything past that mark has been continuously tripping errors, and I'm thinking that that data might be leftover garbage from deleted files I didn't empty out of the recycle bin right before the crash. Could I stop the operation now and use the image as-is since it's probably the files I want? Or will that mess up the recovered data?
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Sep 25, 2014 13:27
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I've had ddresuce jobs die (stall out to kbs/hour) 80% the way through jobs with no ill affect on the already recovered data. Assuming none of the recovered data needed anything from those sections from being too fragmented or whatever, you should be in the clear.
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Sep 25, 2014 15:30
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Orcs and Ostriches posted:I've had ddresuce jobs die (stall out to kbs/hour) 80% the way through jobs with no ill affect on the already recovered data. Assuming none of the recovered data needed anything from those sections from being too fragmented or whatever, you should be in the clear. Cool. I tried the image out in Windows through ImDisk since I assumed it would be messed up or whatever from the incomplete imaging. Googling brought up chkdsk as a method to fix the image, but it's reading as RAW. I'll be running TestDisk in the morning; since the image is technically a partition of the dead drive, I hope it can do the entire thing in one go.
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Sep 25, 2014 15:49
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Rather than trying to image the drive it seems like it would be much smarter to just copy the files you care about. Remember that any drive activity pushes it closer to death, so it doesn't seem like a good investment to waste the drive's remaining life on empty sectors or files you don't care about.
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Sep 25, 2014 23:57
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Alereon posted:Rather than trying to image the drive it seems like it would be much smarter to just copy the files you care about. Remember that any drive activity pushes it closer to death, so it doesn't seem like a good investment to waste the drive's remaining life on empty sectors or files you don't care about. I did try to copy stuff directly, but after the crash the messed up partition caused a lot of slowdown and futile drive activity. The system partition booted fine, miraculously, but considering that even opening My Computer to look at the stricken partition caused Windows to stall, cloning the system partition to a new drive and imaging the rest seemed like the best option. It's weird; everything but that final 50gb~ stretch of the partition looks perfectly fine. Unfortunately, it also looks like the file structure data or whatever of the recovered 150gb was in that lost portion.
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Sep 26, 2014 01:38
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| # ? May 14, 2024 02:44 |
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TestDisk wasn't working, but after some more research, I ended up using RecoverMyFiles since the busted partition was formatted in NTFS. Worked like a charm, even though I had to patch up a lot of game files. Thank God for Steam and easy verification  Thanks for the help, guys! toasterwarrior fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Sep 27, 2014 |
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Sep 26, 2014 14:04
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