Cloning a drive with bad blocks

[Deleted User]

I've had some fun and games recently. After receiving a new SSD I tried to clone my laptop's internal HDD. I used the Clonezilla distro, and it turns out that my HDD has a lot of bad blocks. Could be on its way out, so even more reason to get my data off there.
Now Clonezilla didn't really cope that gracefully with the disk errors, so I'm looking for an alternative to do the cloning.
I believe that a utility called 'ddrescue' is available to do just what I want, but none of the emergency repair discs I have in my collection have it. Obviously I need to use a live CD to do the cloning, as all filesystems have to be unmounted.
Looking around there seems to be a distro called Knoppix, which contains the ddrescue program.
Just wondered if anyone else had experience in rescuing a failing HDD, and could recommend a tool, process, utility, anything to safely get my data off the disk?
Thanks.

 

[psionandy]

I've tried this in the past with tools on the Ultimate boot CD and clonezilla, to mixed success...

I haven't tried it personally.... but you may be able get it into a stable state with Spinrite (https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm) you'd have to buy it, but there is a 30 day money back guarantee... and it comes from possibly the most trustworthy name in computing. Steve Gibson.

(and even if you don't.. the security now podcast is well worth a listen for anyone who has any interest in computer security https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm )

 

[Deleted User]

Just in case anyone else is interested, I ended up using an old 2.5" disk, and installed Ubuntu on to it. Once I'd booted from this, I installed the ddrescue package. After connecting the source and target drives via USB, I ran ddrescue, which took about 10 hours to completely clone the disk.

 

[JerrySong1]

Did your try to run a check disk with the fix option? I know you already cloned it, just wondering what worked?

chkdsk /f C:

 

[Deleted User]

No but I ran fsck, as I'm a Linux user, and that command is the Unix equivalent of chkdsk. However bad blocks can't be repaired, just avoided by the O/S, and it's a general sign of disk damage, so I think it is time that my data was migrated.

But anyway, first time I tried Clonezilla it completely choked on the bad blocks. So that's why I turned to ddrescue, which is specifically designed to cope with data recovery off failing discs. Apparently Windows does not have any reliable capability to do this.

 

[argedion]

I had forgotten about ddrescue I haven't used in a long time thankfully I need to make sure I add it to my recovery disk.

 

[Dngrsone]

For the record, I've had really good results from a program called HDClone... I would use it to move my entire drive to a new one (usually a larger capacity drive).