Hard drive clone taking days

[locutor]

I’m cloning a failing system drive to a new HD. The cloning has run a day already, and the estimated remaining time keeps increasing (currently 48 hrs.) instead of decreasing. I know that errors on the source drive could be slowing the process and affecting the estimate. I’m inclined to let it keep running, but not if it stretches to a week or more.

Just wondered if anyone had any advice. The drive has about 900 GB of data and I’m cloning it with EaseUS Todo Backup Free. I can barely boot from it any more (after several CHKDSKs and startup repairs). Why clone a system drive with errors that prevent it from booting? In hopes that those errors will be more repairable on a good drive than on a failing one. If I have to buy a new system (this Dell XPS 8300 is six yrs. old), I at least need to pull whatever documents and other personal files I can recover from the drive.

 

[Kewlx25]

Consumer HDs will attempt their best to read data off the disk. This includes retrying many many times. While I am not familiar with this situation, but it's not unexpected for it to take a very long time. That being said, I am not sure if there is a better way to approach the situation. I wonder if there are tools to skip over the bad data and just try reading the data that returns quickly.

 

[USAFRet]

In the unlikely even this clone operation actually finishes, you are probably dragging over some bad blocks and sectors to the new drive.

No guarantees on what will work.

I would absolutely NOT bother with trying to clone the whole thing. In fact, that may make getting the critical stuff, your personal data, much harder.

Install a new OS on a new drive, and connect this dying thing via a USB dock. And then, maybe....pull off whatever docs you need from it.