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Thread ID: 139356	2015-04-20 06:25:00	Cloning a failing drive ...	SP8's (9836)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
1398971	2015-04-20 06:25:00	Hi all Methinks I may have stuffed up ... I was getting messages on start up that the HD was failing and I should back it up, so I did ... 3 times actually ! Used Paragon and EaseUS, putting both on one 500GB external drive with 2 partitions. Went and got another internal HD to replace the original .. both WD 1TB blacks (is that PC ? ) anyway .. neither of the clones want to go to their new home. Attempted to put my LEGIT copy of Win 7 HP and it tells me it's not a legal copy (BS). I'm now in a situation where I have 2 clones of the original, a LEGIT copy of Win 7 HP 64 ... and can't get any to go onto the new drive. Yes, the new HD has been formatted and is getting detected in the BIOS ... it has me mildly frustrated and longing for a cold beer out of the fridge. ANY help would be appreciated in getting this sorted ... BTW, I am able to look at both clones on the external HD on another computer and think it may be that the clones are not bootable, but don't know for sure and/or how to fix it if that's the problem. I've done research on the net, but it's just confusing me more. TIA SP8's	SP8's (9836)
1398972	2015-04-20 06:45:00	If the drive is damaged ( failing) cloning may not work correctly. In situations like this, I use Active@ Disk Image from a Bootable CD, make a Image of the Failing HDD to an external USB Drive, then put in the new drive and image it back. While this doesn't work 100% of the time it has a far higher success rate than cloning. Actually had similar over the weekend, one of my own drives I wanted to change to a larger drive capacity. Started off as a 80GB test, but since it was working Fine wanted to go to a 1TB as the smaller drive was filling up to fast -- Wouldn't clone and boot for anything , went through the process fine, no errors :mad: - Imaged it as above with active, dropped the image back onto the 1TB and booted first time with no problems.	wainuitech (129)
1398973	2015-04-20 07:08:00	dd-rescue is excellent for making images of failing drives. Can do multiple passes both forward and reverse and start and stop at various positions on the disk (and continue after a break to put it back in the freezer for a bit :D ). Keeps a log of what it has successfully recovered so only retries the missing bits on subsequent runs. But it might not be quite what you are looking for at the moment ...	fred_fish (15241)
1398974	2015-04-20 07:49:00	Sounds like what you've done is created 2 images that you can't restore, cloning would be a direct disk to disk copy from the old drive to the replacement. Not quite the same. In any case what sometimes works is to restore an image to the new drive then boot off a windows disk and do a repair because the boot files seem to be what fails in the imaging process the most often. The same thing often works for a clone that won't boot. Also make sure if you are cloning/imaging that you are copy all partitions as there is often a hidden partition as well as the C:\ partition. If you are certain your copy of windows is legit and the key has only been used by you on that machine you can just install it and then ring the 0800 number that comes up when you attempt to activate it. MS will give you a new key. If it's not accepting the key at all then either you are mistyping it or your install media is not the same version as the key. A legit key for the right version should always work to install windows even if it then fails to activate because the key is in use.	dugimodo (138)
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