Hard drive copying software?

[Aloone_Jonez]

As I mentioned in another thread, my hard drive is fucked.

I've ordered a new one.

Is it possible to transfer all the data, including the OSes, to the new drive and simply boot it up?

I don't fancy having to re-install Windows and Fedora all over again. It would be nice if I could transfer all the partitions and the MBR to the new drive without having to start from scratch.

I don't care whether the software is Linux, Windows or a live CD as long as it's reliable.

A quick Google found the following programs:
http://www.clonezilla.org/
http://ping.windowsdream.com/ping.html
http://selfimage.excelcia.org/
http://www.partimage.org/Main_Page

Which one would you recommend?

[davidnix71]

There used to be a block-level cloning software that I used. If your drive is corrupt, then imaged copy would be corrupt, too.

Clonezilla is from the SourceForge. I would go with it.

[Aloone_Jonez]

When I boot the system an annoying nag bubble appears saying the hard drive is failing. I click on it and it loads Palimpsest disk utility which lists the following faults:

Relocating sector count: 1
Current pending sector count: 1

It says "Drive failure expected within 24 hours. Save all data immediately"

I'm not too scared, I've been using my computer for a few weeks with it like this but at least I've been given a warning.

I've since disabled the nag bubble but it will be re-enabled after the upgrade.

I know the hard drive is a piece of shit Maxtor, as was the previous one (also a Maxtor) which catastrophically failed; whilst I was using the PC it made a weird noise but carried on working but refused to boot after shutting down. At the time I though it was bad luck because the hard drive was just over two years old but now I know it's because Maxtor are fucking shit.

I will never buy a Maxtor again, the drive on order is a Western Digital.

I don't think the file system is corrupt but I will check all of the partitions before cloning. If there's any data I've lost, I'll probably be on the FAT32 partition, which will be converted to NTFS after the upgrade, it was only there because Linux didn't used to be able to write to NTFS.

[davidnix71]

You can't buy Maxtor anymore. Seagate owns them now. I like SMART drives. I bought a used hd for a laptop and it would boot okay from a firewire drive, but when I put it in the laptop and ran disc utility, DU went nuts and said "get this thing out of here, NOW!"

I sent the drive back for a refund.

[Aloone_Jonez]

It's the NTFS partition that contains a bad sector.

I've just run a chkdsk and it appears that the bad sector had been found and patched on a previous scan. I'm rather annoyed because I haven't been warned about this and what's worse is that, according to My Computer, Windows seems to think the hard disk is working properly.

The good news is I haven't lost any data - it could've been a lot worse.

Are Seagate any good?

I don't think Maxtor being bought by Seagate will improve anything, so I'll add them to my mental blacklist.

[davidnix71]

It's not that one brand is bad or good. It's all batches. Every drive is checked and the really good ones are kept for big corporate customers who don't want mistakes. The not quite perfect stuff is retailed under the makers name and the rest is "white label," which means it passed minimum specs.

If you buy new, demand a long warranty. You'll pay extra, but down time and lost data costs something, too. 3 years is a pretty good warranty.

The reason you have continuing problems with bad sectors may be that they haven't been mapped to the drives' firmware. If you go to Seagate's site there is drive checking software that will append the firmware with an updated list of bad sectors, so it won't matter which OS you run. The protection is then at the hardware level.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Thanks for bringing the 3 year warranty to my attention.

Come to think of it, the old hard drive could be still in warranty for all but don't know what I've done with the receipt.

IF I find my receipt, do I have grounds to make a claim?

With this drive I'll keep the receipt in a safe place, I'll fold it up and attach it to the inside of the computer's case.

You're right, from what I've read bad sectors should be mostly dealt with at hardware level on modern drives so I need to know how many have really failed, it could be that there are no spare sectors.

[davidnix71]

The drives maker knows what the warranty was. Each drive has an embedded serial number. Download the drive maker's integrity checking software and run it. If the drive fails the maker's test it will create a log and you can email the maker for a return authorization.

It probably isn't worth it, though.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I've downloaded the tools.

There's a Windows and Linux version but I went for the FreeDOS based book disk in the hope it'll be more immune to potential OS fuck ups.

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/seatooldreg

I'll let you know how it goes.

EDIT:
The scan found 99 errors and bombed out, it said it couldn't fix them because it's a non-Seagate drive. It is annoying that their software doesn't support the older Maxtor products.

I've also discovered that S.M.A.R.T has been disabled has been disabled it, I re-enabled it from the BIOS set up. Now the BIOS gives an error every time the computer is started so I disabled it again because it was annoying.

I certainly didn't change the BIOS setting, for some reason the PC manufacturer decided to disable SMART which was a stupid idea in my opinion.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I suppose I've reached a dead end.

I'll just have to wait for the new hard drive to be delivered, then I can copy everything across to it.

[Aloone_Jonez]

The FAT32 partition transferred but the others did not.

It looks like I'm going to end up taring the contents of documents and settings and Linux home directory to the FAT32 partition on the new drive and installing Linux and Windows on the new drive.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I've installed Windows and Linux.

I fucking hate installing OSes.

Don't get me wrong, actually installing the OS isn't the problem, it's installing all the other software and downloading the updates that pisses me off. After installing Windows, I ran the MS Update and it installed couple of hundred MB of updates, I rebooted and ran it again and it still wanted to download more; this happened several times! Why the fuck can't it install them all at once?

I installed Fedora 11 and now I'm waiting for it to download and install nearly 1BG of updates. Then I've got to install OpenOffice.org, Kolour Paint, WINE, DOSEmu, RPM Fusion, multimedia codecs, DOSBox and the printer and scanner drivers as the single CD live distribution does not include them. Luckily most of the aforementioned are packages and can be all downloaded at once but the Cannon LBP-660 driver doesn't and niether does DOSEmu which needs SELinux to be tweaked before it'll work.

Then I've got to transfer the tared Documents and Settings folder to the Windows install. I'm not sure if simply extracting and overwriting the existing files will work. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows is going to make it difficult for me so I'm going to back up the origional, just in case something bad happens.

[Refalm]

I use Norton Ghost for Windows installations, it's the best hard drive copy program out there.

There's also an open source version for Linux:
http://g4l.sf.net/