How to Sector Clone a Non-Windows HDD ?

[Steve Sr]

Hard Drive Gurus,

I hope that this is a good place for this question If not please excuse the intrusion and kindly direct me to a more appropriate place.

I have a need to make an identical copy (sector by sector) of a hard drive that is embedded in a piece of equipment. This way the drive can be restored if the original ever crashes. The drive is a Western Digital WD400UE. As far as I can tell it is a standard 2.5" EIDE drive that should plug directly into a PC.

The tricky part is that it contains an unknown file system, at least unknown to Windows. Hence, I need some sort of utility software that is operating system (and maybe BIOS) agnostic. The hardware that I have to work with (so far) is a standard PC with both primary and secondary HDD controllers. I also have an Apricorn Drive Wire interface that will allow a hard drive to be connected to a USB port if this helps. Of course, I also have a duplicate WD400UE hard drive.

I have looked at MHDD utility and it seems to offer some of the needed functions with its sector read and write to/from file. However I don't understand how this can work. If you have a Windows 2K box and basically boot to DOS with MHDD. Now DOS doesn't understand the NTFS file system on the main HDD even if the primary controller was enabled. So where do you copy the image (sector) file to so that it can be restored to the new (clone) drive? I don't know if DOS could even handle a 40GB file.

So, have I overlooked something or does anyone else have any suggestions for how to accomplish this task or perhaps a different utility that is more attuned to doing this kind of cloning?


Thanks,

Steve

[pcimage]

Media Tools Pro.

It does not care about O/S

[Steve Sr]

PCimage,

Yes, it looks like Media Tools Pro would work. Unfortunately I don't think the boss will go for the price since hopefully this will not be needed or used very often.

Does anyone have any other suggestions for simpler and cheaper or free programs that would accomplish this task?

Thanks,

Steve

[DjLizard]

Linux's 'dd' (or the superior 'ddrescue') is the best for raw cloning, and of course they're free. After you make the image you can compress it with whatever you like (I recommend 7-zip although it might take hours to compress it). Or you can just image it directly to another drive of the same or greater size.

I use RIPLinux for fast access to ddrescue:
http://www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robo ... linux/rip/
You can even put it on a USB thumb drive and boot it (if your BIOS supports it).
You can clone the drive to another internal drive or even to a USB-attached enclosed drive.
ddrescue will also be able to get most, if not all, data out of bad sectors, if there are any.

[Steve]

You can use the trial version of Runtime's diskexplorer (fat or ntfs ) since for images or cloning it doesn't care about file system. Runtime.org
Winhex also will clone the drive


Just don't Even think of calling me Jr

[darkforce1]

best and simple to use is copyr or winhex. very fast.

Thanks

DF

[pcimage]

Yep, actually CopyR do a free version.

Just do google search on "copyr" and you'll find it

[Steve Sr]

HDD Gurus,

I thought that I would provide an update on the progress of this project. Using your suggestions we tried both Linux and CopyR. Our chosen box for copying is a generic Intel based E-machine.

We first tried the DD approach with Linux. The main HDDs were disconnected from the primary channel and the source and destination drives were connected in their places with the source as master. Ubuntu Linux was booted from the CD ROM on the secondary Channel. Linux could "see" the blank destination drive but could not "see" the source drive at all. The DD command failed immediately.

Next we tried CopyR booted from diskette. The drives were still connected as before on the primary channel. CopyR was able to correctly identify both drives (read out the SN) and was even able to spin up and down the source drive. This gave us an indication that the drive was still alive and not completely dead. However, when told to copy the program generated errors (which I don't remember exactly) and failed.

In the process of doing this we located a FAE contact from WD at a local company and asked them to duplicate the drive. Surprisingly they couldn't clone the drive either! I don't know what tools they used but am assuming their own factory provided toolset.

After all of this the drive was reinstalled in the equipment that it was removed from and it proceeded to work properly! This proved that the drive was not damaged in the process of trying to copy it.

So the mystery remains. What is "special" about this drive which looks like any other notebook drive that normal tools cannot access it? For reference the model and serial number as printed on the drive and confirmed by CopyR is as follows:

Model = WD400UE-22KVT0
Serial = WXC706147375

Can any of you provide any insight as to what is going on with this drive? Possibly special firmware? Special locking sequence to prevent unauthorized access?


Thanks,

Steve

[hddguru]

PM me what device this disk runs in

[pepe]

Hi,

isn't it password locked?
plug it under MHDD and see the status 'LEDs'

regards,
pepe

[Starling]

Sounds like password locked indeed.

[salvationlaura]

Dear Sir,

I think our product the Power Data Extractor is the best choice for you. No matter what kind of Operating System you use, the software will copy the data from the source hard drive without accessing the operting system. It boots from floppy CD or CD, not from the hard drive.

Power Data Extractor, based on the physical byte-to-byte technology of SalvationDATA, enables you to recover data from the HDDs with serious bad sectors problems that can not be logically accessed or recovered by OS-based data recovery program

see the functions of the proudct for more please go to http://www.salvationdata.com/article.asp?ai=70

Any questions, please feel free to contact me at MSN: sales.laur@salvationdata.com

best regards

Laura

[pepe]

Hi Laura,

will it work on a PWD locked drive?

pepe