Hello Every1,
I am completely fresh to this forum so please forgive me if I try to rediscover a wheel.
Currently I struggle with an 1TB HGST HDD which around its 25% of capacity has some mechanical damage.
The interesting thing is that the HDD works with some problems but works and Windows 7 installed on it too.
All partitions are visible. Unfortunately SMART displays errors so I decided to clone the drive to fix problems on its duplicate.
I used lots of available tools (also in a RAW/sector by sector mode) like commercial Paragon Hard Disk Manager, EaseUS ToDo Backup, HDClone, Clonezilla and finally HDD Raw Copy Tool with the HDD connected to an external (USB) docking station or a hot-plug SATA drive bay.
The problem is that the drive switches off somewhere around this 25% of space during a cloning operation so the operation is stopped and cannot be resumed.
I checked that the drive can operate outside of the 25% so I think it must be some local problem and if the broken area was skipped the cloning procedure could continue.
On the other hand HDD Raw Copy Tool remembers the place where it could not continue, I mean the exact sector at which the HDD shut down the power for some reason.
I observed that switching the power of the HDD off and on brings the drive back to "life".
For such situation I am missing "CONTINUE" or "RESUME" button so the HDD Raw Copy Tool could continue the cloning after skipping some (defined/selected) number of sectors.
What do you think?
Do you have any other suggestions on how to duplicate the drive?

P.S.
My colleague to whom belongs the HDD told me about the problem much to late. For a long time he hadn't check the drive and didn't make any backup since 2016. For such a long time he adopted his laptop to his needs. After several attempts I have copied almost all files available on the drive. So the data are protected. The only problem is the programs and their setup. Up to Windows XP it was quite easy to "resurrect" such system on the other drive having so much data and only several less meaningful files missing.
I restored the backup that I created in 2016 and install the software so I suppose that eventually it will be the final option but just for my experience I would like to be able to clone the broken drive and repair possible errors on the copy.

Thank you for any suggestion
Kind regards
JK

First you would need to assess the level of damage by checking the “SMART” status (CrystalDiskInfo, HDTune, HD Sentinel...).

Then if the damage is still manageable (it probably is if an O.S. can still boot from it), and relatively stable, the best approach would be to clone it (direct copy from device to device) or image it (creating a large file which is an exact duplicate of the source device onto the recovery device) with a tool designed to deal with failing HDDs ; the two best freeware options are ddrescue and HDDSuperClone, both operating on Linux, both keeping a log of the copy process and allowing to resume it without losing what's already been secured. Both (and a bunch of other data recovery tools) are included on the HDDLiveCD, a Lubuntu distribution custom made by the author of HDDSuperClone. It is supposed to be superior to ddrescue in some situations, in particular the kind of situation described here, whereby a HDD becomes unresponsive when hitting a bad area and has to go through a power cycle to be work normally again, until the next bad block is encountered, and so on. I don't have first-hand experience with that kind of situation and HDDSuperClone, so I couldn't comment further ; the author may reply in this thread (nickname = “maximus”). My second serious data recovery endeavour (for my former neighbour's sister) involved a 250GB Maxtor HDD which had that kind of issue, and all I had was ddrescue, with very little experience. I managed to get a complete image (minus about 12MB) by repeatedly shutting it off and turning it back on then re-running ddrescue (dozens of time over a whole night while I was watching stuff on my desktop computer), sometimes changing some parameter in the command (for instance ddrescue can copy in reverse, which is slower but sometimes works better than copying forward -- actually both of these tools include reverse copying at some steps of their regular operation, but it's also possible to do everything in reverse if it happens to work better with a particular case). HDDSuperClone is supposed to do that automatically, but this feature is possibly only available with the “Pro” license, not sure.

I am not sure I understood anything of what's under “P.S.” -- I need some tea right now.

Thank you so much abolibibelot

I was up to use linux eventually.
So you convinced me that I should do it.
As soon as I get some results I will write about it.

Regards
JK

Did you manage to recover the data?