465GB Bootable Drive that Acronis 2018 is taking forever to backup
As delivered HGST 465GB HD in 3yr old M73 Lenovo Tiny ... loaded with Lenovo Recovery Partition + Win 7 Pro 64b ... Drive is passing short Smart Test however failing both Radom and Target Reads ... this Drive is still booting and primary applications are still running ... Acronis 2018 states that it has Sector read issues and suggests to use Sector by Sector backup ... when I did this plus set it to ignore errors, 3 hours passed with only 5% completed, and the time remaining was 3 Days, I decided to cancel the backup ... physically moved the drive to an external Sata/USB shell and attempted to mount it in another Win 7 Pro machine ... this machine continually wants to format all 3 partitions before it can be accessed ... chkdsk /f (set to run at boot up) didn't appear to help while this drive was still mounted as the primary drive in the original computer ... R-Studio sees the partitions when mounted as an external drive, but it is fighting for control because Win 7 continually wants to reformat the partitions (even after cancelling several times) ... WinHex refuses to look at the drive until Windows stops playing around
In the past, with either Ghost or earlier versions of Acronis, I have still been able to image a drive with read issues ... then running Spinrite 6 to rejuvenate weak sectors before doing a 2nd image backup ... doing a fresh OS install on a replacement drive then recovering files off of mounted images from both backups
So should I just bite the bullet and let the backup process proceed for however long it takes? I am currently doing file transfers peer to peer (manually mining what ever the drive gives up)
The bottom line is there has to be parts of this drive that are readable or else it wouldn't be booting ... is there some advanced setting that could force Acronis to back this drive up as best as possible?
This Machine runs 24/7 gathering weather data and security footage ... for some reason the as built images containing the original installation configuration from 3yrs ago have been misplaced which is why I was hoping to capture a backup image regardless of the read failures.


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I'd try an "offline" backup of the drive by booting to your recovery media and starting the image that way. Towards the end of the backup settings, use the option to ignore bad sectors to see if that allows it to complete.
If even that fails, you can try the same, but first select sector by sector. This will backup not just the used section of the drive, but all sectors of the disk (unused too). Your image will be just as big as the original drive and could take a lot longer, but it might allow it to complete. Be aware though, a backup image with bad or corrupted data will restore that bad or corrupted data "as is" in most cases too. You're only able to backup what is currently available on the disk, assuming the disk itself is still physically capable of getting through an entire backup.
And as Steve mentioned, you can try partition by partition if it keeps failing when trying to do the entire disk. At least you might be able to get through the main partition where the data resides if all goes well.
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thx for the replies ... this has to be one of the weirdest hd failures I have encountered in 30+ years of working with this tech ... chkdsk and some old school diag tools confirm there is nothing wrong with the files or filesystem ... scanned the drive with rootkit and virus scanners and found nothing ... yet ... the drive won't mount as a slave or backup sector by sector ... let this run for 30+ hours and never got past 5% ... using a partition backup (not sector by sector) I was able to backup all 3 Partitions ... then attempted a disk backup using the same technique and the drive not only backed up but also restored to a new hd ... running it through all the diags suggest the new drive is fully functional. ... the only thing that comes to mind here is that this failing drive has some kind of armature failure ... ie it no longer can swing to its extents ... as the drive filesystems are 90G/465G there is an excellent chance that there are no active files out on the extents of this drive. All the SMART tests and Sector by Sector would want to confirm moving to the extents but fail without knowing why.
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Terry, thanks for the update on this strange drive problem. Glad that you have managed to do the partition backups and restore to a new drive.
Guess that with mechanical drives, you can get some difficult to diagnose problems unless you have the in-depth diagnostic tools available to the drive manufacturer.
I have seen some odd problems with drives that work in one scenario and refuse to do so in others. I have normally replaced those drives and used them purely for testing type scenarios. My brother has a habit of bringing such drives to me to see if I am able to rescue anything - sometimes that is possible but those times tend to be the exception.
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