I picked up that HGST 2.5" 7200RPM 9.5mm SATA II HDD for $59 along with a "Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA Dual Bay External Hard Drive Docking Station for 2.5 or 3.5in HDD, SSD with Hard Drive Duplicator/Cloner" today. Not certain how accurate the Sabrent cloning would be, I started with just using it as a docking station and now have hddsuperclone cloning my Toshiba HDD. It's reporting 2 hours and 20 minutes left to complete.
I also picked up a cheap set of plastic tools for prying the Toshiba case open. It's tighter than any other I've see in the past & wasn't sure if fingernails and an old plastic supermarket discount card would do it. From what I see on YouTube it's just removing 10 screws and prying the case open. The HDD apparently is in a plastic enclosure that just pops out (hopefully)
maximus wrote:
Both ddrescue and hddsuperclone need the drive to show up as a device, which can be checked with the command "sudo fdisk -lu".
In Mint a desktop icon pops up and there's an audible alert when a USB flash drive is connected. Something is nuts either in the OS or hddsuperclone as when I inserted one of the flash drives (4GB) that was rejected the other day, on 1st try today it was imported as the source drive. But between then and finding another flash drive to clone to, hddsuperclone wouldn't import that same 4GB drive as source. Instead I got the error I got yesterday saying it couldn't set a source drive that was mounted. So in Mint (I'm not very Linux savvy) USB drive context menus show 2 options:
1) Dismount drive
2) Safely remove drive
2) totally disconnects the drive. 1) just dismounts it and leaves it showing up in the file manager. Not all flash drives behave in my Mint the same though. Some don't show the 'Safely remove drive' option. And for whatever reason, I was able to import my 32GB HP flash drive as a source drive even when it was still mounted. I'll test "sudo fdisk -lu after this drive is cloned.
So I skipped the test dry run with the flash drives and went straight to cloning the internal SATA HDD which seems to be progressing well so far.
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As for USB devices not being recommended for use with HDDSuperClone, if the device can be connected directly to the computer via SATA or PATA connector, then that is preferred (even when using ddrescue), but does not mean USB will not work.
Well so far the Sabrent USB 3.0 docking station seems to be connected and functioning properly.
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Some USB adapters can be weird and not process errors properly, but what you describe is odd and should not happen. It almost seems as the OS is not recognizing the USB drive is attached. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that you booted from a USB device, and that is causing conflict in the OS with the hardware trying to detect another USB device. If the device will show up with a "sudo fdisk -lu" command with the proper size, then it should work with hddsuperclone.
It may indeed be some problem with the 2-3 year old Linux Mint OS on this 64GB flash drive I set up to do some data recovery. It's really been functioning pretty flawlessly as far as I can recall. Except for today. Besides these problems with hddsuperclone importing these old flash drive as a source, Mint fully locked up for the 1st time while hddsuperclone was searching for connected drives. None of the keyboard commands I googled would shut it down, so I had to opt for the power button.
rogfanther wrote:
@matt56231 When you get a new disk, it is important to try to restore those cloned images you created when it was new. If they don´t work, it is better to know it now than keep them believing they are useful and later discover in a bad moment that they aren´t.
I have that Acronis image backed up in 2 places along with a number of other image files for other systems. I'll probably attack pulling the Toshiba case off tomorrow and see if I can get Windows 10 installation media to repair the copy that I'm cloning now. If that fails I'll try restoring that Acronis TI image.
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Also, if you can somehow restore those images, create the usb recovery disk from the instalation. That would allow you to restore the original situation of the computer ( OS, drivers, applications ) in case of hdd failure.
That's interesting. Now that you mention it, Windows 10 did have me create a recovery disk... or image file (??) at some point back when I was 1st backing up the drive. I'll look around for it and try to find out what it was all about and how it differs from standard cloning.
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... I believe he is trying to make hddrescue clone to the same usb drive he booted from, instead booting from one and connecting another one later for the clone test.
Hah! I may have tried that at some point in the past
But the Toshiba has 3 USB ports. I booted Mint on 1 and was trying to use the other 2 to clone from 1 to the other. Or I was thinking trying to clone a 16GB or 32GB flash drive to an image file on the 64GB Mint drive.