Hard Drive Data Recovery Cloning a hard drive

Cloning a hard drive procedure


 

Using COPYHD.exe from Data Recovery, inc.

  • step 1: Make sure that the destination hard drive is of equal or greater capacity then the source hard drive.

Cloning with no bad sector(s)

  • step 2: Boot with the floppy or the bootable CD in DOS, startup COPYHD.exe
  • step 3: Select Source and Destination drives.
  • step 4: You can either do a forward or reverse clone of the drive. Reverse cloning will be slower because it doesn't use the disk cache.
  • step 5: Clone the entire drive or select a specific starting sector or a specific partition.

Cloning with Bad Sector(s)

  • step 1: Cloning a hard drive can be tricky, if the source hard drive is physically damaged (scratched), you might kill the heads if you're no careful.

Prepare the destination hard drive

  • step 2: Only connect the destination hard drive and boot up the computer with the bootable Floppy of CD.
  • step 3: Start the eraser program.
  • step 4: Select the destination hard drive and start the Low Level format. This will write all zero's to every byte of the drive. This will eliminate the possibility of contamination of the data with previous data.
  • step 5: Power down the computer.

Cloning the damaged hard drive

  • step 6: Connect both hard drive(s), source and destination only, remove all other hard drive(s).
  • step 7: The goal is to avoid bad sector areas, 1 or 2 bad sector(s) is acceptable and will be automatically skipped by the default settings of the cloning program (you can change these options by hitting the "M" key to enter the program menu).
  • step 8: Start the cloning program COPYHD.exe. Select Source and destination hard drive(s).
  • step 9: Start forward cloning from sector 0.
  • step 10: Copy as much as you can until you reach the first bad sector area, a few individual bad sector(s) are nothing to worry about, but if there are too many sequential bad sector(s), jump at least 10,000 sector(s) to try avoiding the bad area.
  • step 11: Critical areas are sector 95 to 1,000,000 for FAT32 and sector 6,200,000 to 7,500,000 for NTFS (thest areas contain the FAT and the MFT).
  • step 12: You can also start reverse cloning from the last sector.
  • step 13: Keep track of the bad sector areas and jump as many times as necessary to clone as much of the hard drive as possible.
  • step 14: Make a duplicate of the clone to protect the clone that you copied so far.

If you need further assistance see Data Recovery Labs