I'm interested in what others are using and their experiences with HDD cloning equipment\software. I'm particularly interested in HDD duplicators (equipment) with the ability to clone HDD with bad sectors. Thanks in advance for the feedback.

Media tools Pro: Fast, but you have to "baby sit" jobs with patchy bad sectors.

ddrescue / dd-rescue: Good for jobs with weak/bad sectors, but slow.

PC3000 Data Extractor: Powerful, but slow and expensive

Winhex: Quick, but not too good at handling bad sectors.

All IMHO of course.

Sonix do an excellent range of hardware cloners.

I have the Logicube that has got me out of an awkward situation many times.

Deepspar disk imager - just came out.
The best imaging tool out there. Expensive though - >$3000.

I think Media tools is the best .

You can use Media tools without BIOS.

Yes that is correct u can use the media tools without bios .

if u need a professional tool use data extactor then but Media tools works good for me .

I personally find MediaTools to be an excellent program. It does have it's flaws, no doubt, but in general it's very capable

MediaTools (version 5.0 from Prosofteng) does both BIOS and direct access. It can read long (see the option "Last Read Retry Error Control Disabled", but retry level must be set to 1 or higher). Adjustable timeouts, general drive processing, and retries - all adjustable realtime anywhere in the program at anytime(just hit CTRL-S). I also think the program has a great interface (IMHO).

What MediaTools does lack is software reset, sector failure differentiation (UNC, IDNF, etc), no manual way to stop/start engine on HDD, and some other internal quirks that make using it a mixture of excellence and frustration, such as having to be around to tell the program to continue passed the first bad sector encountered.

Aside from MediaTools, I've found HD Duplicator from Copyrsoft to be very effective. Fast and handles errors well - I think better then MediaTools for the most part.

Thanks to all that responded to my posting. I appreciate each of your opions. I'm taking a look at Media Tools Pro. Thanks again!

I think HD Duplicator if you could buy the orginal its the same cost as media tools. but more feature to handle BS

DF

Freeware alternatives:
copyr.dma is another choice, and

pcinspector's clonemaxx works quite well, though the interface is bland
http://www.pcinspector.de/clone-maxx/uk/welcome.htm

Here some info about using cmaxx when your hdd has bad sectors:
open cmaxx.scr and go to "sectorCount = 256", Change it to "sectorCount = 1".

An inexpensive solution with some similarity to media tools:
http://diydatarecovery.nl/DiskPatch.htm

Just released version 3 of disk patch. DP does reverse cloning, the other one's do not, though I the maker of copyr also makes a commercial version with more capabilities called hd duplicator.

Hope this helps.

More experiences with these proggies are welcome.

Ciao,

Brahman

HDDuplicator is excellent. We purchased a copy for the shop and use it daily. It works much better than anything else I've tried and is damn fast. Takes a little getting used to so that you can get a good clone and really bad drives. Try copyr the demo version of HDDuplicator to see how it works, it doesn't give any of the custom settings that HDDuplicator gives but it still works quite well.

Hi all,

Just a quick update on this topic.

I recently bought the DeepSpar disk imager from Canada.

Verdict: VERY good.

It's imaged a number of drives in a fraction of the time other software-only solutions have taken. Also it's perfect for imaging failing drives, or ones that have been head/platter swapped. It's also imaged failing/weak drives that regular software would have trashed by continual retrys.

Default image is in 3 passes, the first does a very quick pass, getting all the good sectors as quickly as possible (I've done a 40Gb drive in 20 mins with it), the second pass is in reverse with a longer timeout to get weaker sectors. The final pass is a "data recovery" pass which reads each sector 10 times ignoring ECC, from these it saves what it thinks is the best read, which is usually 99%+ accurate.

Also it saves a record of every sector read / unread on the target drive, so you can stop/start at any time, say if another job comes in.

Only slightly annoying thing, is that the target drive has to be at least 5-6% bigger than the source, and you can't disable the saving feature, so you can't image from one drive of the same size to another.

Hope this helps.

Sean

yes,he's a good guy
pepe

What is the price for the deepspar?

driveRecovery
Starling

Guys, seriously... This is absolutely pointless. There is no stupid people on this forum. If you do not stop this, I will take action.

Deepspar Disk Imager list price is $3200.

They had an offer in Jan for $2000 so I bought one.

Maybe they can do the same offer now, I don't know.

we've got one in our it department, useless and can't handle much more than data extractor, the price is crazy.

?

You must be using it wrong IMHO.

We have DE and DDI, DDI is far superior for imaging. Many jobs that DE would just destroy.

But, by the same token I have had jobs that DDI could NOT do.

1. A Fujitsu laptop drive that thought it's max capacity was 2Tb, DDI would not see it. DE would, and I told it just to image form LBA0 to real end. Worked

2. A Maxtor drive with failed write head, so could not initialise without loader. Could have changed heads, but easier to use PC3000 with loader and use DE to image.