Disc Cloning

Downloaded and installed HDTune

Ran error scan. One red block, though report says 0.0 pc damaged

Could this one block be the cause. If so, where do we go from here,
please??

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On 05/09/15 18:24, Ophelia wrote:
Downloaded and installed HDTune

Ran error scan. One red block, though report says 0.0 pc damaged

Could this one block be the cause. If so, where do we go from here,
please??


What exactly is the problem? You haven't said anything about the
problem itself.

You installed HDTune but then do you get any error messages? If so can
you tell us something about it.

To clone your disc, you could try CloneZilla. It works on most machines
as it is Linux based program but can be booted in Windows environment.
I have used it in the past to clone my Windows HD.

Ophelia wrote:
Downloaded and installed HDTune

Ran error scan. One red block, though report says 0.0 pc damaged

Could this one block be the cause. If so, where do we go from here,
please??


Well, this answers the question "what could trip up
an ordinary backup program". It depends on the location
of that bad sector, as to how critical it is.

Using CHKDSK and the /r option, is good if the bad
sector is in a data cluster on the partition in
question. But not all errors fall in convenient places.

The trial version of HDTune (try it for 30 days or so),
the error scan will give the LBA address of the problem
sector. The free version, 255, just gives a red block
if there is an error. I think the Pro version, it lists
the LBA of the sector with the error.

http://www.hdtune.com/

*******

The problem with these sectors with errors, is finding
a modern application that handles them properly.

They mention here, that "ddrescue" is available under
Cygwin, but that doesn't really impress me all that much.
I had one utility "ported" under Cygwin, and the disk
identifiers were all wrong. You could not tell that
particular utility (using Windows notation), which
partition to use. If the Cygwin version (runs under
Windows) didn't work, you would use the Linux LiveCD
version. And yes, using this is going to make your
eyes glaze over. It's command line material, and
requires knowledge of disk identifiers as a function
of the environment you're working in.

http://forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

The basic idea is, there is the source device and some
destination thing. In the first example, you're doing
a disk to disk copy. In the second, it's like making
a .mrimg file, only recording even the sectors
you don't really care about. So if you use this
utility, with a 500GB source drive, the destination
hard drive would need to be 500GB, or the imagefile
would require room for a 500GB file. So for the second
form of the equation, I might use an NTFS partition
on a 1TB drive.

ddrescue -n /dev/sda /dev/sdb

ddrescue -n /dev/sda imagefile

Later, to put the imagefile back as a hard drive,
you can use the regular version of dd (since nothing
is going to throw errors, with the new hard drive).
So this command, is for moving the imagefile back onto
a drive (as a "restore" command).

dd if=imagefile of=/dev/sdb

Some of the disk backup utilities, are supposed
to be able to clone and "step over" errors for better
or worse. The problem comes, when you actually try it,
and the utility bombs out. The ddrescue is the only
one I trust for this purpose, because that's the only
problem the program claims to solve. And that's the
problem of copying from a disk with CRC errors. The
program only has that one purpose, that distinguised
it from the regular dd command.

To use the Cygwin program, you would install the
Cygwin package, which would give you the cygwin.dll
that is the key part of allowing foreign programs
to work while in Windows. Using tick boxes, you
only tick the items you want from Cygwin. For example,
I have a Cygwin copy of "disktype" utility now,
but if I run it, the output isn't exactly the same
as the original program. One level of disk access
seems to be modified, to make Cygwin mapping work
in that case.

I sure home someone else has a utility for you
that works. As command line is a last resort.

*******

The original reference to ddrescue, I found at
the bottom of this page. You don't have to
compile it from source - the package manager
on a Linux LiveCD can download a working copy, to
be run from the Terminal in command line mode.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Damaged_Hard_Disk

Paul

On 9/5/2015 11:20 AM, Stormin' Norman wrote:
On Sat, 5 Sep 2015 18:24:04 +0100, "Ophelia" wrote:

Downloaded and installed HDTune

Ran error scan. One red block, though report says 0.0 pc damaged

Could this one block be the cause. If so, where do we go from here,
please??


If you don't want to install Easeus and try that first, you can try to repair the drive or at least mark that
sector / block as being bad, see below:

If it is the C: drive, you can try running chkdsk c: /r from an administrative command prompt.

Can you access the device manager and tell us exactly what make and model the drive is? The drive
manufacturer might publish a repair utility.

I suppose I should include the obligatory caveat; you should back up the drive before running chkdsk /r.

Back in the day, there existed utilities that used the number of retries
or access time to map out "slow" sectors with the assumption
that they were on the way to bad anyway.
Does that functionality exist today with more modern technology?
I assume it's much more difficult to determine "slow" in a multitasking
environment.