Resolved Clone/Image Failing Hard Drive

Working on a Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit HP Desktop with a possibly failing Hitachi hard drive. I have all the data saved and placed on another unit.

For a while, the computer would simply freeze and I had to power it off manually. That situation seems to have righted itself and the computer seems to be acting somewhat normally. When I run Disk Check I get messages that "File Record Segments 121500, 01, 02, and 03 are unreadable ". When I ran Speccy, I got the following:

S.M.A.R.T.
Status Warning
Temperature Temperature 32
Temperature Range OK(Less than 50)
S.M.A.R.T. Attributes - All showed Good

I downloaded the HGST Drive Fitness Test (Hitachi no longer supported on the Hitachi website) and when I opened it, it did not identify any drives - so no scan could be run.

Question #1 - Can I clone or image the suspected failing hard drive and restore on a clean hard drive?

Question #2 - If the answer to above is yes, could I use my Manhattan QuickDock Duo to simply copy the suspected failing hard drive to the clean one?

 

Evan,

The Manhattan QuickDock Duo is what I have been using to access single hard drives to retrieve data. However, it has a feature that lets me mount two hard drives side by side and copy one to the other - although I have never used it for that. That won't create an image but I would assume that would be the same as cloning.

I don't have a clean hard drive but I do have a 500GB that I pulled from another computer that has stuff on it but I was planning to format it and use it copy from the bad drive. What is the best way to clean/format that drive so I can use it for that purpose?

 

Evan and Tony T,

Been away for the past week but plan to work on this unit over the weekend. Tony, from what you said, I gather that I should use third party software (Macrium Reflect?) to clone the drive that is failing and then restore the clone to the new, formatted HD.

 

I recently used http://www.aomeitech.com/ to copy the disc.
My Seagate HDD (spinner) was copied to my new Kingston SSD and it worked perfectly and very quickly.
Once the copy was finished I Shut down the comp and disconnected the HDD and re-booted the comp and it started and ran W8.1 normally on the SSD. Neil.

 

I tried copying/cloning to the empty hard drive using the Maxium Reflect software. It stopped about 1/3 of the way through and didn't progress for several hours. I then tried creating an image using Maxium Reflect and that stalled about 1/3 through. I am suspecting that it stops the process when it gets to the corrupted sectors. I may give AOEMI a try and if that doesn't work then I will mark this one "Resolved" and try something different.

 

If you have bad sectors, most of the cloning software would choke. Instead of cloning, try to get your data off it.

 

Thanks to all for the inputs.

rsinfo - I did this first thing so the data is safe. I think the first part of your post validates what I suspected.

I installed and tried running the clone using AOEMI as retiredlearner suggested and had the same result as with Macrium Reflect. It stalled about 1/3 of the way through the process.

I was hoping to preserve the Windows 7 system but it appears more difficult than I anticipated. Not my main computer so I will call it a good experiment and mark this Resolved.