Can I Clone or Image From A Bad Hard Drive?

I have a device that hooks into my Linksys router called a Mirra Personal Server that continually backs up all of my files throughout the day. I have had it since 2005 and is out of warranty and is no longer even made. After several tests with company on the phone they have determined that the 120gb hard drive has sector errors on it keeping it from working. They have determined that the EIDE hard drive is bad. This is the device. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/external/mirra_personal_server/


My computer is running Windows XP Pro and I use Acronis 10.0. This Mirra Personal Server for what ever reason uses Linux even though I am using Windows XP. Do you think it is possible to take this hard drive out of the Mirra server and hook it into my Windows XP machine and try to either get an image from it or maybe even do a clone to a new hard drive. I would unhook my cd rom ribbon cable and then hook up the bad hard drive in its place. Is this possible?

 

YOu can, with ATI 11 you can tell it to ignore bad sectors -- but you won't capture anyting in the bad sectors. Otoh, you can not tell it to ignore bad sectors and you will have sectors marked bad on the new disk that might not be bad.

So best thing is to run a chkdsk/r before doing another backup -- this will flag any bad sectors and (try to) move any files that are using them. If any files couldn't be moved that need to be moved because they used faulty sectors, then you'll need to replace/reinstall those files. Once you're sure the your system and progs are in working order, do the backup and then restore to a new drive. Afterwards, any prog that sems wonky shuld be repaired/reinstalled on the new dirve.

 

Very interesting. Will Windows XP chkdsk/r work since the hard drive in question is using some type of Linux application? I have used that utility several times on hard drives that had Windows XP loaded on them an it worked awesome.

 

Assuming no issues with a physical connection of this drive (as I have no knowledge of the Mirra), find out what file system is used on it, and assuming Ext2 or Ext3, check out http://www.fs-driver.org/. Note that I have not used this driver myself.

Assuming you get this all working, your first order of business may need to be just copying as much off of this drive as possible and as quickly as possible, depending on the condition of the drive in question.

Doug

 

I put the hard drive out of the Mirra server into my Windows XP Machine and it was detected fine. It now shows as Local Disk F. However, when I try to run chkdsk on the drive nothing happens. I assume this is a problem since the hard drive has Linux installed on it.

 

The first thing to do is repair as much of the drive as possible and then clone it to a new drive.

I would use Spin Rite 6.0 to do the repairs http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm. It operates below the file system level and is regarded as one of the best hard drive repair utilities on the market. After Spin Rite is run at its highest level, you can clone it with TI. If you upgrade to TI 11.0, you could also image the drive with the sector-by-sector method and restore it to a new drive.