Salam! A few weeks back i bought new Samsung SSD 840 EVO for my work laptop, I’ve ordered with the disk a SATA/IDE to USB 3.0 adapter. So i can clone my old HDD to the new one through USB. I’ve looked up a few options on Windows on how to clone a disk and surprisingly it wasn’t easy! First of all i tried Samsung software for data migration and cloning started but it failed when it came to the middle of cloning. Next, i tried Macrium Reflect. same thing it failed when it reached to the middle. Then i decided to use what i know, downloaded a copy of Clonezilla and burned to USB stick and booted the USB. Selected disk to disk cloning and i kicked it off, In the middle it showed couple of messages about having a bad blocks and it did stop, so I’ve booted again and selected advanced mode and did the clone with –rescue option, I needed Clonezilla to skip the bad blocks and continue. Guess what? it worked! i was able to clone my Windows 8.1 to the new SSD disk. but! after couple of days of using my laptop, I’ve discovered that my laptop is missing some of the important drivers, like power driver. So, i was not able to shutdown or suspend my laptop. System was not stable, a lot of errors was shown. Then i came to know there’s something important in those bad blocks that I’ve skipped “Duh!”.
Bottom Line:
After searching over the internet, I’ve read that my best friend for retrieving the data on bad blocks will be dd_rescue. booted again into Clonezilla and dropped into the command line “dd_rescue come by default with Clonezilla” and issued the following command line:
For the purpose of this article, we shall say /dev/sda is the bad drive and /dev/sdb is the working drive.Clone sda to sdb with dd_rescue:
dd_rescue -r=1 –S -v /dev/sda /dev/sdb recovery.log
Here’s a breakdown of what the command actually does:
-r=1 = retry the damaged areas infinite times
-S = Sparse mode. May save a lot of disk space in some cases.
-v = Verbose mode. Shows all the details about what’s happening.
/dev/sda = the source drive
/dev/sdb = the destination drive
recovery.log = The name of the log file. (can be whatever name you want.) In case you need to stop and restart the process, the log file will keep the spot of where the process left off.
guess what?? it worked this time!! I’ve been using my laptop for a couple of weeks for now and it looks good.
What You Can Do With A Bad Disk?
Actually the disk is fine excluding couple of blocks, so there’s utilities in Widnows and Linux to tell the OS do not locate any of your data on theses bad blocks. Happy cloning!!