So my OS drive is starting to fail I think. Its not clicking or making any noise but its hanging at the windows start up screen. Windows repair doesnt/cant do anything. Even with the disk

So I decided to install a external drive. Thereby making it an internal drive. Lets call this drive A. From now on. And B for the old one.

So since I cant even get B to boot to the desktop half the time(and the other half when it does it'll completely freeze with five minutes), I cant make a system image of the drive.

If I have A installed with a fresh Windows 7 install can I then make a system image of B inside the installation of A? And then restore A from a image of B?

 

I don't know the answer to your question, but I have a program which might assist you when it comes to copying files. Teracopy.

Teracopy is a replacement for Windows own filecopy mechanism. It tends to be faster, handles multiple copies in parallel much better, and is also more accurate. I have it configured to copy files as normal, and afterwards it'll do an CRC check on both the original and copied file to make sure that the copy was accurate. It sounds perfect for an environment where the hardware is unreliable.

 

Sounds interesting.

Frankly I've been trying to find the answer to my question and I think its not booting from B because bad sectors apparantly arent being reallocated correctly.

Im wondering if I should just start copying directly from b and just dump it on A.

Edit: oh wow its definitely the hard drive itslef. I ran check disk from A on B and it completely locked up the system after about 3/4 of the way in.

Edit2: OH HOHOHO! THAT IS GOOD.


BOOTMGR is missing.

Press ctrl-alt-del to restart.

 

On the old or the new one? You should be able to repair the bootmgr with your Windows DVD. Also, go to the website of the manufacturer of your old HDD and download the diagnostic tool from there - every manufacturer got it's own, so be sure to use the right one.

Here are a few:

Seagate
Western Digital
Hitachi/HGST
Toshiba

 

On the old one.

I'll try out the diagnostic tools but I'm burning ubuntu rescue remix to a Cd. See if that can get anything out of the hdd.

Edit: Yup WD tool(its a 80gb wd hdd) says everything is pass except for that one. However the quick test passed. SMART says FAIL.

Doing extended test now.

Edit2: and it completely froze up during the test. yeah its broke. RIP 8+ year old hdd. I'll keep you on life support but its gone.

Sigh. Really the only reason why I want to get stuff off the harddrive is because I really dont want to configure mirc and nns. AGAIN.

Edit3: Got ddrescue running. lets see what i recover off the hdd.
Edit4: And ddrescue froze. That... That is impressive. Yeah that hdd is gone. Im not getting off of it. AND I gott reinstall windows. AGAIN. sigh.

 

Did you try direct copying yet? The bad sectors aren't everywhere so you should be able to get some data off of it. Can you make a screenshot of the SMART output? If the WD tools don't show it to you, you can use Crystaldiskmark. I'm interested in how many bad sectors there are.