Cloning/Imaging a failing hard drive

[ms365]

Hola folks, I hope you are all doing great. So my Satellite L850-B750 suffered a hard drive crisis 2 months ago. Basically, it got slower and showed SMART errors. Since then, I have been running it but there have been increasing issues with it. I finally go the opportunity to get a new internal HDD. Firstly, what alternative do you suggest to MQ01ABD100? Should I just get this drive again? I basically need a similar storage device but anything better would be welcome.
Secondly, I have a lot of data and my original OS installed on the failing drive. Can I clone it without the risk of data loss? Would creating an image would be better? A serviceperson told me imaging has less risk of data loss than cloning. Is that true? What equipment would I need and if you could share any good amazon link that ships worldwide?

Thank you

[DaveLembke]

A serviceperson told me imaging has less risk of data loss than cloning. Is that true?

The risk with cloning is if you get confused between say Drive 1 containing your important data and Drive 2 the blank drive, you could if you get the sequence backwards clone the blank drive to the drive that had data deleting your data.

Your biggest problem is that you have a laptop that doesnt allow for 2 hard drives to be connected internally. And cloning between an internal drive and another connected via USB is quite slow if it works at all. The best way to clone is between 2 drives connected to the drive controller such as SATA ports. This would run the unhealthy drive for only as long as its required to transfer data, as for a slower communication means could allow for a drive that overheats to run hot before all data is transferred and then cut out.

What OS do you have on the laptop to work with? We might be able to get you to image your drive successfully and go that route since its a laptop.

[ms365]

Thank you very much for the reply.(I noticed i typed the post hastily and made some language errors :p). Anyway, I am running windows 8.1. I got the sata to sata cable but im not sure how I would go about using that for creating an image.
P.S: I just turned on the laptop.Although its working its really slow now and booting etc takes good amount of time.

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

To add to what Dave said, I would replace the drive with

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-1TB-Laptop-Hard-Drive/dp/B00DCM91WQ/ref=sr_1_144?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1438118827&sr=1-144&keywords=western+digital
I would copy the drive on a desktop PC using
http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/
If you don't have a desktop with spare drive ports can you find anyone with a setup like that to do it for you. Any computer repair company would have that setup.
The reason to use that Western Digital drive, is it is a few Mb larger than the Toshiba drive which you need when raw coping a drive.
If you raw copy a drive this way providing there isn't too many errors on the source drive everything is copied exactly. So when the  WD drive is put into the laptop and it will boot up the same as the Toshiba MQ01ABD100 drive . But a lot faster
A computer company would have tools like Paragon drive copy which would copy the source drive to say a smaller ssd and still have the ssd as a bootable drive. Software like that costs.

If you would like a hardware option
http://www.amazon.com/Dyconn-Dubbler-DUBDB-Superspeed-Docking/dp/B0094C0DYI/ref=sr_1_9?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1438119886&sr=1-9&keywords=usb+disk+copier
But as Dave said you have to be extra careful which way you clone the drive . I don't know how good the instructions are with that unit but normally they are very brief.
And they don't seem to handle disk errors without stopping the copy.
The Rawcopy above seems to handle data errors much better.

[DaveLembke]

I personally prefer the drive duplicator as for its fast, however it might be only a 1 time use if you dont have any future use for it. I got mine for $40 at newegg around christmas on a sale that I couldnt pass up and it works fast and very well.  I have used it to clone HDD's and SSD's and HDD to SSD and SSD to HDD etc.
http://www.unitek-products.com/en/product_detail.php?id=302

If going this route you have to be careful to get the drives placed correctly so that your not overwriting the troubled drive and wiping out its data. If done correctly it works well if the drive isnt too far gone to grab all the data off of it. 

The duplicator that Lisa suggested also would work. I just wanted to specify my model that i have that works well, and I have used many times.


*** Also you can use it to turn a drive into an external if you need to grab data off of a drive or want to use a drive as an external.



     

- Super Speed (5 Gbps) / high-speed (480 Mbps) / full-speed (12 Mbps)

- SATA III (6 Gbps) & SATA II (3 Gbps ) & SATA I (1.5 Gbps)

- Supports offline duplicate function, all data or system files copy into your target hard disk by pressing one simply button. Copy rate at 230 MB/s     

- Accept 2 x 3.5" or 2.5" SATA HDD plug-in one compact unit, data can be transfer between 2.5” and 3.5” SATA HDD

- Two hard drives can be read & write at the same time

- The dual bay docking station connects to the computer via USB3.0

- Hot swappable, without driver installation

- LED progress indicator shows clear copy status

[Computer_Commando]

If there are errors on the drive, you might not be able to clone or image it.  You should have done something when you saw the SMART warning.

S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART) is a monitoring system included in computer hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) that detects and reports on various indicators of drive reliability, with the intent of enabling the anticipation of hardware failures.

[DaveLembke]

If there are errors on the drive, you might not be able to clone or image it.  You should have done something when you saw the SMART warning.

At this point, you cant look back at what should have been done, just need to move forward with the future. If they want their data moved to a healthy drive, sure it could fail, but its a chance they would have to take to try to get back to a healthy system state with their data.

Lastly to note, if the drive did fail to clone, they could use the drive duplicator as a external drive. Build up the OS fresh clean to the new drive and then connect the ill dive to the duplicator as an external. Then access the drive to extract a copy of the most important data from the ill drive to the healthy drive if the data corruption is not resident in the data file folders. So if Windows was corrupt on this ill drive, but their personal data was in the still healthy part, they may be able to copy the healthy data from the healthy portion of the ill drive to the new drive.