I am looking for a best way to transfer everything from failing hard drive to a new one. I am using ubuntu 14.4 Any help? Tried clonezilla but it failed due to bad sectors on source drive. Any help is appreciated.
2 Answers
In this case, the only option left would be ddrescue. Just download and boot a live system, connect a drive to transfer the files and run ddrescue.
There's what Strabagl said, but any time I had gotten in laptops at work that had failing hard drives (recently noticed, so still readable), we simply live booted Ubuntu on a USB, attached an external hard drive with a SATA to USB adapter, and started moving things over from within the OS to the drive. When a hard drive begins to fail, you will find that file saving won't work and all, but it should still be readable for the most part if the hard drive has just recently started showing symptoms. The last time I tried it, I think there were only a few files I wasn't able to grab from a guy's Macbook. But, it wasn't a lot, we still were able to grab the majority of his items. I would not suggest any method that clones a drive, as I found that it will fail whenever you reach the unreadable portion. Also, even if you did succeed in cloning the drive, you must be careful about what tool you use to clone a HDD to an SSD, and even certain kinds of SSDs to other kinds like SATA to PCIe or NVMe (we had lots of problems with compatibility, very long story). But, my experience on that end is with Windows, although I am certain the issue would occur with other OS because copied drivers would definitely cause issues that would require more work to resolve. My preferred method is just moving files from within the Linux OS, I am not familiar with how ddrescue works.
