When should I give up on cloning a failing hard drive?

[lee_r]

I’m in the process of cloning a disk image of a failing 1.5Tb external hard drive in order to then salvage files.

The cloning was going slowly but surely until a couple of days ago. Once it hit the 1Tb mark (69.1% cloned), things ground to a halt. In the last three days, the image has progressed to 69.3%. Or so my software says…

The disk is still spinning, and beeps occasionally. At the moment I have an ice pack sitting on it (with a folded j-cloth between them) to see if that helps.

How much longer I should leave it going before giving up? And if I must give up, what are the next steps?

Things I’ve tried already:
- OS X's Disk Repair (could not repair)
- TechTools Pro directory rebuild (could not complete operation)
- new enclosure (didn’t help)
- the clockwise/counterclockwise motion thing
- the vacuum-sealed double-bagged freezer trick
- selective file recovery with Stellar Phoenix (got halfway through and then froze)

Hardware: Mac Mini 2.6GHz i7, 16Gb SDRAM
System: OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.5
Drive in trouble: Seagate FreePlay 1.5Tb USB 3.0 (15 mm; sold as FreeAgent)
Cloning to: empty WD MyBook 4Tb external drive
Cloning software: Data Rescue 3.2 (strategy: segment)

Any help would be MUCH appreciated!

 

[RaDiKaL_]

- the vacuum-sealed double-bagged freezer trick

That one is practically the last attempt, from my experience that one gives 4-6 extra hours of "life" and then the HDD is gone (at least that's the max time I've had them running)... so you've been for at least 3 days trying to clone it, I really doubt is going to advance further, dunno if one can use a non completed cloning image to clone another HDD...

I guess you could try to leave it in the freezer again and try to boot with a live OS CD like Ubuntu to recover as much critical info as you can by simply copying it to your external drive, this method is the one I usually use since one can never know if the HDD will survive long enough to finish a cloning attempt, good luck.

 

[trekzone]

I think you could just leave it there and keep it going until the application prompts you that it has failed or it made a successful clone. However, if Data Rescue would fail in cloning the drive you may try cloning your drive using ddrescue in Linux as it is known to work well in cloning drives which already contain some bad blocks.