Question Cloning my C drive without actually cloning?

zenonithus

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Aug 12, 2009
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Hello all, I tried cloning my c drive using Macrium Reflect, though without success. I get an error saying failed and to run disk check which I have done though still failing to clone. I have managed to clone the system reserve partition and other unknown partition onto the new disk. I then created a partition for windows. My question is can I just copy all the windows files in explorer to the new partition, swap places with my c drive (removing and swapping drives) and then will windows start from my new drive? I have a feeling it is not as simple as that :D any advice would be great. thanks
 

zenonithus

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Aug 12, 2009
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I'm copying from my c drive SSD to a much higher capacity SSD. There seems to be a problem with the C windows partition where it just gives an error when about to clone stating to run 'chkdsk c: /r' which I have done many times to no prevail.
 
Ddrescue and HDDSuperClone would be my preferred choices for cloning drives which have bad sectors or bad heads. These tools are specifically designed for such scenarios. Most other cloning tools assume that the source drive is perfectly healthy.

Also, if you are cloning a file system (ie file by file) rather than a raw disc (sector by sector), the cloning software will often (always?) insist on checking the integrity of the file system. If the file system has inconsistencies, then the cloning process will be aborted.
 

USAFRet

Titan
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And Macrium, in forensic mode, does the same. Sectors, not 'files'.
Copies the whole thing, faults or whatever.

But...if the source drive or data is faulty, a clone is absolutely not recommended for anything but forensic analysis and possible data recovery.
Not actual use going forward.
 
And Macrium, in forensic mode, does the same. Sectors, not 'files'.
Copies the whole thing, faults or whatever.
Does it skip over bad patches? Does it do everything in a single pass?

Those other tools will recover the easy sectors on the first pass, without retries, and then try for the more difficult ones on subsequent passes. Both tools will skip over any bad patches, with the skip size being user selectable. HDDSuperClone, in particular, attempts to understand the bands of sectors (serpentine segments) corresponding to each head so that it can avoid any weak head until the final pass. In fact ddrescue and HDDSuperClone are the only DIY cloning tools recommended by data recovery professionals today.