Hello,

I have this 7200.12 drive, which came in an HP tower from around 2012. The date code on the drive is 11103 and the firmware is HP35. The symptom is that the drive works for a few minutes (I even managed to run a chkdsk on the thing -- and it found some bad sectors), but then the drive stops responding.

From what I understand on the forum so far (And thanks to all the great contributors), I need to disable "relocation" which is causing the drive to stop responding, and then either copy the important files as fast as possible or run Ghost.

I have Ghost 11.x Professional on a portable Windows environment boot DVD, so my plan is the folowing:

1) Attach my TTL adapter to the HDD (per this post) and the serial port of a seperate computer and make sure I see the prompt in the terminal software
2) Connect the Seagate and the replacement drive to the second computer and boot to the PE with Ghost
3) Run these commands:

4) Immediately run Ghost on the PE computer

Does this sound right? Is there any variable I can issue to Ghost that would make the clone run smoothly? Also, I understant that power-cycling the drive should re-initialize it so that it functions, if only for a few minutes. If that's the case, will Ghost tolerate the power-cycling or do I indeed need to disable relocation?

Thank you

As an alternative, learn to use ddrescue in linux. It comes standard with Knoppix and some other live builds. When using it make sure to use a log file (this is actually how it keeps track of which sectors are read and which aren't). It's much better at handling drives with bad sectors.

With ddrescue you can pause, power cycle the drive, and then continue.

I don't think you'll need to disable relocation to use it.

_________________
Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

The syntax you'll use is as follows in linux command prompt:
ddrescue (triggers) (source) (target) (log)

so a command will look something like:
"ddrescue -F dev/sda1 dev/sda2 /home/users/knoppix/Desktop/ddrescue.log"

(obviously you'll need to adjust to how it identifies your drives and where you want the log file)

_________________
Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Thanks.

Can I use HDD Raw Copy Tool as well? Eventhough I'm no stranger to Linux, it's easier for me because it has a GUI, and I can add it to my PE image because it's portable.

Will these programs handle clones of larger drives to smaller drives as long as the data from the larger drive fits on the smaller drive? Ghost does this. It's not a big deal because I do have some 3TB drives I can use, but the replacement I'm getting is a WD5000AAKX.

I loaded HDD Raw Tool onto my PE disc.

I hooked up the drive with an external brick adapter that has an on/off switch (I don't normally recommend this because HDD PSU Bricks are usually of very low quality and can kill HDDs, but this one was modified by me).

I finally got the process to start by cycling the power a few times. It's going at around 50MB/sec. My only recommendation to the authors of this software is to make an option like Ghost's "Image Boot" so that I don't have to copy the entire drive.

Assuming a 1TB drive is really around 930GB, this will take a little over 5 hours to complete. I hope the drive doesn't conk out during this time, because I don't know how HDD Raw Tool will respond to a power cycle during the process.

Thanks everyone.

You can use gddrescue if you want a GUI.

Thanks, I wasn't aware there was a GUI.

HDD Raw Tool is almost 90% done. Looking good. If it's successful, I can run an ordinary ghost on the 3tb drive to where It's copying to now to the brand new WD5000AAKX with Ghost.

People are kiling their HDDs with poor quality power supplies. If the capacitors on the 12v and 5v rails are poor quality, your harddisk has to put up with excess ripple in the DC voltage.

Get good power supplies!

Update:

It took 7 hours with HDD Raw Tool, but the cloning finished.

If I may make a suggestion to the developers of the software, it would be to include some sort of fast error skip option. Reading and failing on the bad sectors is what took the bulk of the time.

After swapping out the defective drive with the replacement, I ran chkdsk a couple of times, rebooting between each run, and it's now transferring from the 3TB drive to the 500GB. Ghost automatically readjusts partition sizes if you use the "image boot" option, obviously only when the data does not exceed the capacity of the destination drive. When that finishes, I'll run the SRT and SFC tools of Windows 7 to replace any corrupted Windows files.

Thanks data-medics for talking me out of doing the relocation, thakn you bos, and thanks to the proprieters and members of this site.