Need Help to clone or image unformated or unrecognized HDD

[marose1]

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I have a Karaoke DVD/HDD Player that includes a Hard Disk Drive (600 GB Seagate) with several thousand songs. There are NO PROBLEMS with the Hard Disk Drive or the data on the drive (no recovery of data is neccessary), but I want to back up the data or clone the drive to another HDD in case there are problems with the existing drive/data the future.

I removed the HDD from the Karaoke Player and installed it into my Windows 7 computer. When I attempted to access the Drive and the data on the drive, I received a message indicating that the drive was NOT FORMATTED, and further asking whether I wanted to format the drive (Yes or No?). Fearing loss of data or other problems, I selected "No", and proceeded no further.

I do not know if the drive is unformatted, raw or formatted with a format that my Windows 7 computer does not recognize. What I would like to do is to clone the drive or make a disk image (to another drive) without changing anything on the source drive.

Please help with suggested procedure to follow and recommendations for the best software necessary to achieve success.

[harddrivespecialist]

Just use any imaging software to make a clone of your drive.

[marose1]

Thanks -- I have Acronis True Image and I'll try that.

[Vulcan]

I have Acronis True Image and I'll try that.

FYI any cloning software that you use will need to make a raw clone i.e. not attempt to understand the filesystem and copy only the blocks marked as used by the filesystem, but instead to copy every block on the disk.

I haven't used Acronis for a long time, but last time I did use it, its default mode was to copy only the blocks used in the filesystem - I don't know what it does with a filesystem it doesn't understand, so I suggest you check that.

There are (IMHO simpler) cloning utilities for making raw clones (e.g. HD Clone on Windows, which has a free version), which don't attempt to interpret the filesystem(s) at all, but personally I would use Linux/Unix and so can't give many options for Windows users.

Note: It's possible that the karaoke machine software is locked to that exisiting drive (or its serial number / make & model / etc.). Therefore you might want to clone it onto a different drive and try using that cloned drive briefly in the machine now, so that you can find out if the clone will actually be useful to you in future.