Advice on cloning from a dying hard drive...

Hi all,

I am hoping one of the gurus here can help... I am trying to help a good buddy whose HD emits a lovely intermittent screaming noise that just does not sound healthy, and will occasionally fail to read/boot...

The good news is that since the impending failure is still just intermittent, and the drive is at least temporarily working again, I've been able to copy the key data onto a DVD. There is a second HD in the computer, and I'm hoping to clone from HD1 to HD2 while HD1 is still working to avoid having to reinstall everything.

TI8 gives me an error message that says that either (1) there are bad sectors on a drive (obviously, a possibility, but right now HD reads and writes normally -- at least until the screaming comes back), or (2) there is a disparity of sizes in the drives (HD1 is FAT32 and reports as being about 114GB, HD2 is NTFS and reports as being about 111GB). I would think that I could solve the disparity in size problem by using the "manual" option, but it gives the same error message. I have tried both the "proportional" and "as-is" options with respect to resizing under "manual" control.

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Many thanks,
Barnaby

 

get the data you need off it ASAP..but also this can work..



Hard Drive in the Freezer

http://www.meetmyattorney.com/slink/mt-archives/2003_05.html

Hard Drive in the Freezer Part 2


Over a year ago I wrote about freezing a dead hard drive and then putting it back into a computer. That blog receives many hits a month. Well here is an update to that story. A few weeks back, the same hard drive wouldn't boot up. It would click and click and then hang up. Well I took it out of the computer and headed for the freezer once again. After about an hour, I put it back in the computer and booted it up. It would not boot to Windows but I was able to get the DOS prompt. From here I ran scandisk and found a few problems on the disk. After the problems were fixed, I formatted the drive and installed Windows on it. A few days have past and it's still working fine. This must be one tough hard drive.
http://www.meetmyattorney.com/slink/mt-archives/000517.html