Disk cloning options

[Aenkill]

Hi,

 

My main storage disk is failing - it's a spanned partition (two physical disks: 3TB+500GB), the 3TB one is failing. I've scanned it with HD Tune Pro and it seems to have bad sectors. I bought a new one and I'm trying to copy the data over (around 2TB). Copy/paste worked until around 95% of data has been copied, now when I try to copy over the remaining stuff it throws some errors when copying (which is expected) but even if I skip them it just freezes. I've looked into cloning software like EaseUS (they have a free trial), but it seems it doesn't work with spanned partitions, they just don't show up as an option.

 

I do have a network drive (WD My Cloud) that should have all the files backed up, but copying over network will take absolute ages, so I'd rather start with cloning the disk and if there are some corrupted/missing files I'd copy them over from the network drive.

 

Any thoughts?

 

Thanks,

Sara

[Aenkill]

Update: I'm trying to clone it using AOMEI free software, it should take around 5 hours. I'll post an update once it's done.

[Brian]

Bad Sectors are always a PITA to deal with, especially when cloning. You might have some data loss, though it sounds like you have a handle on things. Let's see what happens after 5 hours.

[Aenkill]

It was stuck at the very end so I cancelled it and just out of curiosity started "sector by sector" cloning option, which will take twice as long ugh... I guess I'll let it run overnight (right now it shows 6 hours remaining) and if that fails, I'll just copy from the network drive and hope for the best. I'll report back tomorrow, might be a useful lesson for someone someday (hopefully not!).

[Brian]

I'm thinking a Network Transfer is in your future. Might as well cut your losses and start it now. I've been in your shoes and it's not fun.

[Aenkill]

"Sector by sector" copy actually worked. Now, I'd like to perform some sort of data integrity check, because I expect some files will be corrupted and I've noticed that there are some issues with copying some of the newer files to the network drive from the original drive, so I can't trust it 100% either. I haven't found a tool that could perform the check yet.

My plan is to clean up the files on the new disk, since I have A LOT of pictures that should have been deleted a long time ago (out of focus, etc. generally rubbish) and then wipe the network drive and copy over cleaned up files only. This is going to be a long week...