Failing to clone drive - MFT Error

[WhoopAss_McGue]

Last week my 5yr-old hard drive starting failing (disconnected from the BIOS completely a couple of times, even after cable changes, then reconnecting on its own after a few reboots. I bought a new one and have tried to use Macruim Reflect to clone the old hard drive, however it fails with the error 'MFT corrupt please run chkdsk /r'. I've done so a couple of times and it still fails. Trying to run a long test with Seagate tools tells me the HDD has failed an important validation test, yet gives it a pass on a SMART test. I'm unsure what the problem is and help would be appreciated.

Some further info:
- The HDD is a secondary drive and has no OS on it.
- Despite failing it seems to work fine enough for most tasks, there's no other problem than being unrecognised by the BIOS, and it hasn't done that for almost a week now. I haven't encountered any data on it that seems corrupted.
- Bypassing the validation check while cloning seems to let the data copy over and it only fails right at the end. ('Read error' and 'Permission error'). The data on the new drive is inaccessible and the file system is corrupt. Running chkdsk /r on the new drive apparently fixes the issue, but the data size drops from 2.7TB to 700GB, and although Windows will then allow browsing through the folders, the files seem to remain corrupt.

I'm also wondering that, as there's no OS, if I could just copy and paste the files over on the new drive.

Anyway, thanks in advance.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hi there.

You'll probably have better luck with simply copying the important data on smaller chunks rather than trying to clone a drive which obviously has issues.
Another option would be to give it a try with different cloning software, hoping that you'll have better luck. However, note that if there are physical problems with the drive, which make the data corrupted, you might end up with the same result.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[WhoopAss_McGue]

Chkdsk finally fixed the MFT issue, however the cloning still fails with the read and permission errors, and all the cloned data is corrupt. Currently I'm copying the files over via Windows Explorer as suggested, and it seems to be okay.

 

[WhoopAss_McGue]

Copy + paste has seemed to work - Currently running the new drive with no problems (so far...)

However even though ever file and folder has been copied across, the new drive has 500GB. Has Windows marked bad sectors on the old drive as full or something? Or is there some hidden data I've missed (Show hidden folders is enabled).

 

[Boogieman_WD]

If the drive is larger than 500GB it's possible that the rest of its storage capacity is unallocated (not partitioned and formatted). Would you please post a screenshot of what you see in Disk Management? Here's how to open it: How to access Disk Management in Windows.

Basically if there's unallocated space you could either create more partitions or extend the existing one by right clicking on it and selecting "extend volume".

Please let me know what happens.

 

[DR_Luke]

When a drive is failing, it is ill advised to run chkdsk, as it does not handle bad sectors well and could result in significant file loss. There is an article about the risks of chkdsk which outlines some of the risks. Unfortunately, there is no way to undo any damage done to the MFT after chkdsk has been run. The files and folders that were dropped from the file structure can now only be found with a RAW recovery scan using a data recovery program, such as R-Studio.

As for cloning, Macrium is not really made to handle failing hard drives and I suggest you consider using GNU ddrescue or HDD SuperClone, both free opensource programs for Linux. They are designed to work around bad sectors and have a log so that you can restart and pickup where you left off, without having to reclone sectors that have already been read successfully.

Be careful, the more you run the drive, the more bad sectors will form and more data lost. If your data is worth a few hundred bucks, it might be worth consideration to send the drive to a data recovery pro before it is too late.

 

[WhoopAss_McGue]

If the drive is larger than 500GB it's possible that the rest of its storage capacity is unallocated (not partitioned and formatted). Would you please post a screenshot of what you see in Disk Management? Here's how to open it: How to access Disk Management in Windows.

Basically if there's unallocated space you could either create more partitions or extend the existing one by right clicking on it and selecting "extend volume".

Please let me know what happens.

Whoops I meant to say the drive has 500GB less data than the old one even though every file and folder was copied. The partition is the full space of the drive (6TB).

I've been using it for a few days now and everything seems to be running okay, I've not run into any issues with programmes missing files or anything.

 

[fluked]

There is a table of S.M.A.R.T. checks here... S.M.A.R.T.

Any critical ones are obviously bad foreshadowing and S.M.A.R.T. doesn't cover everything, you could have a bad serial connection.