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HDD software corruption

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Issue is fairly simple. HDD makes this infamous 'clicking sound', indicating that the arm is going 'nutso'! This in turn corrupts several cinfig files for disk, not allowing disk to start. Start system with bootable disk, and this gets me to the disk files, but there is apparently no way to get these files off the current HDD onto something else?! If the disk came with instructions for this failure maybe I could get there, but no such instruction exists. There is no back up file available, and system does not give any idea how to accomplish getting files from the original HDD onto some other media, so they can be recovered! Anybody got any ideas as to how thjis can be done? I have slaved HDD to new drive, but the drive is not readable by OS, as it has no OS of its own, so it does not appear when loaded as slave.

What is the procedure for getting the uncorrupted files off of original HJDD onto new HDD, or other media? Running Windows XP SP3.

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Hi Timothy,

Currently I am using Acronis True Image 2009, but I assume that more recent product versions still support the following options...

ATI has a feature which allows you to clone a hard drive to a new hard drive. The key is to configure the cloning operation to ignore all errors, allowing the cloning process to ignore bad sectors on the failing hard drive which otherwise would throw an error and stop the cloning process. It has been a few years since I had to use this feature, but I recall that the process retries several times to read each bad sector before ignoring the error and moving on with the process. Most bad sectors on my failing hard drive were recovered, but some were not. Nevertheless I was able to clone over 99% of the failing hard drive's contents to the new hard drive. After the cloning process completed, I removed the original failing hard drive and hooked up the new hard drive in its place. I then went into BIOS on reboot and made sure that the new hard drive was detected and that the BIOS was set to boot from the new hard drive. Amazingly, the new hard drive booted Windows just fine and I ended up just a few missing data files which couldn't be cloned since they were in bad sectors on the original failing hard drive. I don't recall if there is a sector by sector cloning option, but if there is then you do NOT want to select that method since your hard drive is failing.

Finally, I don't recall if I used the Rescue Media to perform the cloning operation since I don't recall if the Rescue Media supports drive cloning. If the Rescue Media does support drive cloning, then that would be the best way to go rather than cloning the drive by starting ATI in Windows.

I hope this helps.

--GTP

P.S. I forgot to mention that the process can take several hours when cloning a failing hard drive. Best to start the process just before going to bed.