HDD GURU FORUMS

Since yesterday I've been trying to clone a 4TB Seagate onto a 5TB Seagate external HDD through USB. At first I kept getting skip resets, so I kept readjusting the base skips size, trying every value suggested in the manual, but got a skip reset every time. So I disabled Phases 1 and 2. Since then it's been running for over 6 hours, gotten through less than 4GB, all the read rate measure stay at 0 and the remaining time says over 7000 days.

The damaged drive is spinning, no clicking sounds. It containes about 1TB of data and is formatted to ExFAT.

The log files are here.
And a screenshot for good measure.

Would quite appreciate any help, mainly determining whether there's any hope I might be able to retrieve something in a matter of a few days of run time (maybe next time it would be a better idea to get several smaller drives than one big one).

I looked at the log, and it shows the sense return data as 20401, which would be key=2, asc=4, ascq=1. That is listed as "Not Ready - becoming ready" in my documentation. It would seem the drive is not becoming ready. A terminal log would be the next step to see why, but I cannot help with that. You should stop trying to clone it, because it is simply not going to work with the condition the drive is currently in. The drive could have firmware issues, and/or a bad head with possible media damage. If the data is important, seek professional data recovery.

Not really important, just would prefer to have it than not...but not enough to be willing to pay a significant sum for professional recovery.
So this seems to be it then and I'm just gonna get it replaced.

Thank your for the reply.

I would like to point out that while HDDSuperClone is designed to detect when a drive is not responding and stop, this case seems to escape the check. This is most likely because the drive is connected as USB. If it were connected as SATA that would not happen. It is always best to connect a drive directly as SATA whenever possible. USB is not always predictable.