Repairing Damaged Partition(s)?

[Karl00]

Occasionally I see HDDs with messed up partitions. Is there anyway to fix these? Current situation has about 2-3,000 bad sectors, and I want to clone the drive. Command line doesn't see the Windows partition. GParted shows a warning flag for the OS partition and the 120MiB partition, a Microsoft reserved partition, before it. Already backed up the files, but customer would like a clone.

 

[lcoughey]

You must clone first, then fix the clone. Check the resources section for instructions on using ddrescue.

 

[Porthos]

You must clone first, then fix the clone. Check the resources section for instructions on using ddrescue.

Always clone first, Do not work on the bad drive.

 

[Markverhyden]

^^^ . Yes, always image and work from the image. Also make a copy of the image so if the first one gets damaged (irreparable) you're not trying to create another image from the patient.

If it was me I'd advise the customer that with that many bad sectors a clone to a new drive may have problems and might not be evident right away as you can't really exercise the entire installation. Of course if they are willing to pay hourly I'll fiddle with it all they want trying to get things running.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

Also make a copy of the image so if the first one gets damaged (irreparable) you're not trying to create another image from the patient.

This is a good point and not one that I have taken into consideration before. I certainly have the hard drives in stock to do this. I'll change our process.

 

[Markverhyden]

This is a good point and not one that I have taken into consideration before. I certainly have the hard drives in stock to do this. I'll change our process.

That was a painful lesson I learned many years ago when I first started doing this. Imaged the drive with Ghost to another drive. Could not get it booting and wanted to try again. Patient died on the table. At least the data was still good on the image. And it's nice having really big, low priced drives to store images these days.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

That was a painful lesson I learned many years ago when I first started doing this. Imaged the drive with Ghost to another drive. Could not get it booting and wanted to try again. Patient died on the table. At least the data was still good on the image. And it's nice having really big, low priced drives to store images these days.

Yeah, we do a single image, but cloning that first image to a second good drive should be significantly faster and so, worth it to do.