Cloning a failing hard drive

I purchased True Image with the intention of cloning a failing Western Digital
120g IDE hard drive from a DELL Dimension 8250 onto a new WD 250g IDE
hard drive.

The old drive is failing the SMART test because of the re-allocated sector count. (131, threshold is 140)

I have three questions.

1) Can I install True Image onto and run from an external USB 2.0 drive?

2) Will the new drive appear to be only 120g after the image copy

3) Would I be cloning my old drive's problems onto the new drive?
By that I mean, would the bad sectors be copied as well?

 

Hello mOOnbarker,

I don't remember anyone reporting it, but I see no reason why you couldn't install TI on the external USB drive (as long as you do not activate the Startup Recovery Manager). But you should create a Rescue CD anyway.

To allocate the whole 250GB you should perform a partition(s) restore with resize. If you have more than one partition on the old drive, you should select the first one, resize it and then tell the Wizard (towards the end of the steps) that you want to include more partitions, so you will be able to select and go trough the screens for the subsequent partitions (resizing again) and finally select the MBR and Track 0 as well.

Restoring partitions with resize does also prevent the bad sector flags to be transferred to the new drive. Therefore, you should image/restore, not clone.

 

Hello bVolK,

Thanks for the advice. I'm creating a full Backup Archive of the
soon to be dead C: drive.

I've installed the new drive as a cable select slave but haven't done any
disk management on it yet. Will the restore take care of that for me?

 

Yes, you can restore as above to a blank new drive.

When you have the image stored on the external drive and verified , disconnect the old drive and connect the new one as master. Boot from the Rescue CD and restore the image to the new drive. Check first that the external is seen by TI after booting from the Rescue CD.

 

The boot disk assigned Drive Letter C: to my external USB drive.

My new internal hard drive defaults to F in the restore setup.

Any way to change the drive letter assignments?

 

While booted from the recovery CD Linux has its own method of allocating drive letters. As long as you know which drive is which just carry on with the restore process. When finished shut down and disconnect the usb drive. On reboot into Windows the new drive will be seen as C and all will be back to normal. Windows will also assign a letter other than C to the USB drive when you reconnect it.