Cloning a bad drive with DiskGenius

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invertedpanda

invertedpanda

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  • #1
    So, I had been struggling with disk performance issues on my media production rig for some time, but it was working, so I basically just dealt with it. Search indexing and saving files would slow things down sometimes, and I'd occasionally get a BSOD (once a week if I never rebooted, or if I did some heavy disk load work), but for the most part it worked fine.

    Lately I've been getting tired of the problems, so I finally bought a new SSD and prepared to clone everything over to it with DiskGenius.. Which has been an experience.

    I first just tried to do a straight clone (booting into Windows PE), but after a while it stopped making progress and the error message log filled up with read sector errors. I knew SOMETHING was happening because it would add a new entry after a few minutes into that log.

    After doing a scan & repair and a few restarts, I've decided to let it go.

    I'm cloning a 1TB NVME m2 SSD, and it has been going for over 24 hours now.

    The actual progress has stopped at around 1/3 of the way this time around, and now we're just filling up the error log. Previously I got as far as 50% before the error log thing.

    DiskGenius apparently says it WILL work, but it's going to take some time even though it appears to not be making progress.. And I'm wondering if that's actually the case here :)

    I could drop the money for the paid version of DiskGenius and try a sector-by-sector copy, but I wanna see if my fellow Arsians have any suggestions.

    I don't mind waiting for it to finish; While I use the machine for work primarily, I've also got my Linux laptop that I can easily work from (and my gaming rig can be used for Adobe suite stuff); only thing I'm missing out on is audio production capabilities, which isn't an urgent need at the moment.
     
    tiredoldtech

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  • #2
    Some more information may be needed to give a better answer including what kind/size/type/age of original drive and speed of interface used (SATA II, M.2, etc), for starters.

    However, if it's puking that hard halfway and then not even halfway through, the drive may be toast unless the failure is with a problem reading different interfaces/encryption (such as not having the proper drivers loaded in your PE as this can most definitely slow and crash/corrupt in some instances).

    Also, if you're using Windows 11 for example and the drive formatting of Win11- using a PE of Win7 is a very bad idea. However, if the OS/formatting on the drive is Win7, Win10, etc and the PE is Win11, it should work ok with the verified proper drivers. Finally, if the drive format/OS is Linux- using a Windows PE may not be the best thing and a LiveBoot (DVD/USB) of a flavor of Linux with recovery tools may be the better way to go.
     
    invertedpanda

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  • #3
    tiredoldtech said:
    Some more information may be needed to give a better answer including what kind/size/type/age of original drive and speed of interface used (SATA II, M.2, etc), for starters.

    However, if it's puking that hard halfway and then not even halfway through, the drive may be toast unless the failure is with a problem reading different interfaces/encryption (such as not having the proper drivers loaded in your PE as this can most definitely slow and crash/corrupt in some instances).

    Also, if you're using Windows 11 for example and the drive formatting of Win11- using a PE of Win7 is a very bad idea. However, if the OS/formatting on the drive is Win7, Win10, etc and the PE is Win11, it should work ok with the verified proper drivers. Finally, if the drive format/OS is Linux- using a Windows PE may not be the best thing and a LiveBoot (DVD/USB) of a flavor of Linux with recovery tools may be the better way to go.
    Click to expand...

    It's a 1TB M2 SSD, "Team" brand. No idea on the actual age, as it may have been a refurb based on it's issues. Cloning to a Samsung 990 1TB. Disk Genius handled adjusting the partitioning to compensate for slightly less GB available on the Samsung drive.

    And I don't think the drive is completely toast; I can actually boot using the drive and utilize the computer fully, no problem.

    And DiskGenius created the Windows PE instance, and also says it is fully Windows 11 compatible (which is what the machine is running). I'm not running any disk encryption, and it's reading files no problem (it shows what file it's on during the cloning process).. It's just hitting bad sectors on the drive, as I noted, and it takes a long while to move on.
     
    tiredoldtech

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  • #4
    GB differences between the Team branded drive and the Samsung 990? That already sounds like something is wrong. They should be the same if they are both 1TB M.2 SSD (as you had stated). It's leaning more towards data corruption/bad drive IMO with the more details given. Bad SSD's aren't like the old spinning hard drives where data was a little easier to recover. Another note about most of the "free" data recovery apps out there: They are almost ALL limited to some extent (1GB or 2GB or x,000 files- or only certain file extensions). This unfortunately includes DiskGenius free version: "Cannot save partition table and only small files can be copied" during recovery. That would explain the hanging or stop that you are seeing, as it won't recover files over a not clearly stated size when doing recovery/cloning of a corrupted drive. You may either need to engage some pricey professional recovery services, or accept there is corruption/data loss on the drive and try to get as much readable data off as possible (manual copy) to a new/cleanly loaded drive.
     
    Andrewcw

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  • #5
    Are you cloning with Bitlocker on? And if your system is stable enough. Why aren't you just live cloning and trying to do it in a PE environment from the stoneages? Samsung Magician's Clone tool should do everything for you.

    Most transfer errors and stability issues are not the HDD/SSD's. HDD's would be giving out smart errors or you'd hear head seeking. SSD's are generally catastrophic and don't just produce time based BSOD's. The general culprit is bad RAM.
     
    invertedpanda

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  • #6
    Andrewcw said:
    Are you cloning with Bitlocker on? And if your system is stable enough. Why aren't you just live cloning and trying to do it in a PE environment from the stoneages? Samsung Magician's Clone tool should do everything for you.

    Most transfer errors and stability issues are not the HDD/SSD's. HDD's would be giving out smart errors or you'd hear head seeking. SSD's are generally catastrophic and don't just produce time based BSOD's. The general culprit is bad RAM.
    Click to expand...
    Bitlocker is not on.

    I'm using Windows PE because that's what DiskGenius uses in order to do a disk clone of the boot disk, and I wanted to eliminate as many things that could interfere with the process as possible.

    I haven't used Samsung's magic clone because I didn't realize that was an option here.. Which is why I started the thread, so that gives me something else to try.

    RAM is good; I've already run checks on it. The SSD has numerous sector errors, however - there is no question there. Every other piece of hardware is operating absolutely fine, and the machine actually sped up quite a bit on boot after running a repair on the bad SSD.

    I think you misunderstand me; I'm not saying time itself is the factor for triggering a BSOD, but generally after enough activity something will have triggered it.
     
    invertedpanda

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  • #8
    Tried Samsung's tool, and it errors out at the same spot every time.

    Decided it'd probably be easier to just re-install everything; Most files are on Dropbox, and I'm backing the rest up to an external drive for now. Once that's done I'll reload Windows on the new drive, barring a better solution coming up.
     
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    Ardax

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  • #9
    That's a much better solution anyway. Your drive is obviously dying, hastening its demise by trying to copy stuff you can redownload or reinstall from a known good source is a bad idea. Do a fresh install on a new drive and throw the old one in an enclosure so you can manually copy off the files you can't trivially replace before the drive bricks itself for good.
     
    invertedpanda

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  • #10
    Ardax said:
    That's a much better solution anyway. Your drive is obviously dying, hastening its demise by trying to copy stuff you can redownload or reinstall from a known good source is a bad idea. Do a fresh install on a new drive and throw the old one in an enclosure so you can manually copy off the files you can't trivially replace before the drive bricks itself for good.
    Click to expand...
    I just wanted to avoid doing an actual fresh install because there's going to be a LOT of installing/configuring that needs to happen.. But at this point it was taking too long to just clone the drive that it makes more sense to fresh install.
     
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  • #11
    invertedpanda said:
    I just wanted to avoid doing an actual fresh install because there's going to be a LOT of installing/configuring that needs to happen.. But at this point it was taking too long to just clone the drive that it makes more sense to fresh install.
    Click to expand...
    Trying to clone a failing drive, especially an SSD, makes it likely that there will be corrupted files created on the new drive which may not be immediately apparent during usage until you try to access that particular file, or the OS tries to load one of its own files and pukes. The cloning app may get bad data, or may skip over bad blocks, and you might not know for a while. With a mechanical drive, it could at least make many attempts with a bad sector and possibly manage to read it successfully (though it will often still fail), but an SSD retrying blocks probably isn't going to succeed. If the failure isn't making the system unusable, and you can perform a clone and it at least is able to finish, then you may be able to use the cloned system just fine and never actually run into problems (I did that plenty of times at my job, where it was more cost-effective to try it that way rather than doing a manual rebuild), but if it struggled this badly, you might eventually finish but it probably won't boot or will have lost a lot of data. Once you see that its fighting that hard, it becomes faster and easier to just reinstall no matter how much stuff has to be done, and eliminates the risk that you'll spend all that time cloning and then later find out it was bad and have to reinstall anyway.

    Another issue is that cloning with bad sectors will often make the NEW drive have "bad" sectors marked.
     
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    Ardax

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  • #12
    invertedpanda said:
    I just wanted to avoid doing an actual fresh install because there's going to be a LOT of installing/configuring that needs to happen..
    Click to expand...
    I get it. Reinstalling sucks. I pretty much lose a couple days getting my system back to spec easily every time I do.

    These days Windows is reliable enough that the only times I do a clean install are for new hard drives or new computers. Or I do something dumb and really knacker up my system. 🤣
     
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  • #13
    Ardax said:
    I get it. Reinstalling sucks. I pretty much lose a couple days getting my system back to spec easily every time I do.

    These days Windows is reliable enough that the only times I do a clean install are for new hard drives or new computers. Or I do something dumb and really knacker up my system. 🤣
    Click to expand...
    I used to re-load Windows all the time, but now I've got to do SO MUCH to get everything where it needs to be. Install, drivers, WSL, all the software from multiple different sources, etc.

    Hell, getting a Linux install back up and running is faster nowadays. I can pretty much just run the install, add a few new repos, and then run a single command to batch install everything I need and copy over my .bashrc :p
     
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  • #15
    Ardax said:
    These days Windows is reliable enough that the only times I do a clean install are for new hard drives or new computers.
    Click to expand...
    I don't even clean install when I change mainboards anymore. Certainly not just for changing a hard drive. I only do it when I've actually changed Windows versions, like 7 to 10, where I might do an in-place upgrade just to get the license activated and transferred to the new version but then I wipe and reinstall.
     
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  • #16
    Ardax said:
    Sounds like you need a big ol' Powershell script to install a bunch of things from Winget/Chocolatey/Scoop/etc. for new installs :)

    I find that Windows Update does an absurdly good job of pushing drivers down to my systems these days.
    Click to expand...
    Windows does a decent job with most drivers, like audio and networking and other basic stuff, but is still never the latest and of course doesn't come with utilities (although I never install any of those anyway), but it never has optimal video drivers and the control utilities for them, nor main chipset drivers for desktops (and Intel has basically stopped providing drivers for their chipsets and only provide them through Windows Update).
     
    invertedpanda

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  • #18
    continuum said:
    Totally doable!

    Although I'm so spoiled by InTune these days... (that's not relevant to home use)
    Click to expand...
    Unfortunately, that won't handle everything; Steam, Adobe suite software via CS, Adobe Illustrator CS2 via installer (and yes, I actually bought a license for it back in the day before they gave away the auth for it), Propellerhead Reason & modules, DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Gigapixel AI and a crap-ton of other software that will also need to have configurations set/imported.

    Not something easily automated, nor worthwhile given I haven't had to do this in years :)
     
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  • #19
    There's always Ninite; Scoop; or Chocolatey (as mentioned earlier). My preference is Ninite. I use Scoop at work, but I notice if you don't keep up with the maintenance of it, either by scheduled task or manually, the cache can go nuts. It also doesn't always update pinned icons to launch the application, so you may be launching an old version. Scoop offers more options compared to Ninite.

    Ninite is good, been around forever, but doesn't have everything and a lot of usefulness is built into Windows or not needed anymore (i.e. most archive tools; security tools; codecs; and a lot of utilities), but will grab most basic items to get you up and running (Browser; Discord; Steam; Spotify; VLC; etc...).

    As for cloning, maybe try something like Clonezilla? I've had it clone successfully on several hard drives that have failed. It'll take a long time in that case, and will give errors on bad sectors, but will keep chugging along. Those were old school spinny drives though, not sure how it'll handle a dead SSD, but might be worth a shot if you desperately need the data from it cloned.
     
    invertedpanda

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  • #21
    Alright, finally got the core of everything set up. Still have a handful of apps to install, and need to get my external backups restored (which I'm nervous about because when I connected the drive it said it was damaged; running through scan/repair now), but I have a fully functional stable media rig again :D

    What's interesting is it basically saved my "installed apps" in that it kept the shortcuts, and clicking it would direct you to where to get it to install it, which is interesting. It's a buggy feature, though; sometimes the non-installed stuff won't show the actual icon, and will instead show the default blank document icon.

    Windows, of course, decided that my vertical monitor was going to be my primary and I had to go through the first-time config with my head tilted sideways.

    Nevermind that I had a perfectly usable laptop screen. That'd make too much sense to just assume that's the primary display when it's active, right?
     
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  • #22
    invertedpanda said:
    Nevermind that I had a perfectly usable laptop screen. That'd make too much sense to just assume that's the primary display when it's active, right?
    Click to expand...
    Well, most people plug in an external display that will be larger and perhaps higher resolution, intending to use that as the ONLY display in many cases (often crippled by using it in a lower resolution duplicating the laptop itself rather than acting as two screens) so I'd say it's a damned if you do damned if you don't situation, once they made it so Windows would work with two screens during initial setup anyway. A lot of people would be upset no matter which option they chose, and the majority just don't even think about it. Laptops usually have a function key option for switching the screens that should have moved the setup to the laptop screen. Or you could have just unplugged the external.
     
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  • #25
    continuum said:
    Yah for Adobe we actually build out deployable packages...
    Click to expand...
    That was one nice thing in college way back in the day; It wasn't long after XP came out, we were given licenses to pretty much EVERYTHING MS had, including Sharepoint. I used it to build out installer packages for all my apps so I could just run those to get everything re-installed every time I wiped my machine :)
     
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