cloning and image restoration Q's using Acronis

jamok99

Estimable
Nov 30, 2014
7
0
4,510
Bear with me, as I have a couple Q's that can be a bit complex. Easy part: I have a laptop WD drive that is starting to show signs of failure (Smart parameters warning, on some SMART versions, the 'Current Sector Pending Count' shows a red circle with a bar across it. The number of sectors affected seem to climb abit with each boot - think 99 was the last number.) And I've found at least one, and by other methods more, sectors with data that I get a 'can't read that' error. I ran checkdisk with error correction, and it seems to have finished and done its work, but still, when I made a partition backup using Acronis Home 11, I got 2 error messages saying it couldn't read some data - I told it to 'try again' and it didn't give me any more error codes.)
Now the tougher part: 1. How can I be sure that I'm not simply copying badsectors or data from an old drive onto a new drive that I plan to put in that machine as a replacement, once I either clone a copy or make an image and restore it using Acronis 11?
Some weeks ago I tried 'clone disk', using first, a drive of the same size, and then, a drive larger (orig is 320 gb, larger was 500 gb) using an acronis 2011 boot disk and my laptop, setup the way acronis advises for cloning. But it gave me error messages saying it couldn't complete the clone process.
I made a new *partition* backup today using Acronis, just as a safety backup. It gave me one 'read' errors - perhaps 2, in the process but I said 'retry' and it didn't complain further. I am able to mount those images as virtual drives in Vista, and can access data. But as I said, that's a
'failsafe' backup in case things get worse.

2.. I'm in the midst of trying to make a full disk image of my hard drive (the one failing) in the laptop. Should I have made it bootable or not - Acronis' instructions seem unclear to me.(Recording now - I chose not to make it bootable - and I'm copying the image onto a 3,5" external disk.) If it succeeds in making a whole-disk image, I could theoretically restore that to another laptop hardrive - and I'd use one of the same capacity, for simplicity's sake.

3. If I am able to do that, does the image *have* to be restored to a new drive using the laptop and the Acronis Boot Disk (i.e. Recovery) that i made for the laptop, which is running Acronis home 2011, or, using a desktop machine running Win7 and acronis 2015, could I restore that image using Acronis on that machine onto the new HD, then pug the new 320 gb laptop drive into the laptop,and have it work? Or, do I definitely need to do it from the laptop itself usng the 2011 version?

4 if that fails to work on the laptop, could I take the old laptop (failing) hardrive, and the new clean laptop hard drive, and clone the old one to the new one, having plugged both those drives into my Win7 desktop machine via usb enclosures? So far, there seems to be something about either using the laptop to clone or restore image, and/or using the 2011 on that machine that makes this process fail.

Sorry to be so circuitous and long-winded, but I wanted to include as much info as I could. I am a low-to-moderately informed in terms of tech knowledge. Thanks in advance.
 
How can I be sure that I'm not simply copying badsectors or data from an old drive onto a new drive that I plan to put in that machine as a replacement, once I either clone a copy or make an image and restore it using Acronis 11? - You can't

Do a Checkdisk on your current drive to see how bad it is.

Should I have made it bootable or not - - If the disk is bootable, so will be the image

Sometimes it just easier to do a clean Windows install on a new drive then putt drivers and apps on it and copy data across to it.
 

jamok99

Estimable
Nov 30, 2014
7
0
4,510


 

jamok99

Estimable
Nov 30, 2014
7
0
4,510
i7baby - Thanks for replying - couple things not clear to me - the link to newegg goes to an Azsrock mobo- not what you intended yes?

Once I'm sure I've wrung out what I can from the old disk, I will run chkdsk - but I did that before initiating the copy/image/clone stuff -and it did come back with some read errors, as I said. It 'reparsed' some data - as a near-newbie, I'd assume that means it found some bad sectors, salvaged data, re-wrote it to good sectors, locked the bad ones? Even if I check it later and let the chkdsk run for hours (oh, wait - I *could* run it without repair, and see what it yields, even if I told it just to notify me of errors - that'd be shorter.) But, the drive itself is about 8 years old, and I assume it's not getting better from here :)

Made the image backup (now almost finished) non-bootable. Might have to do it again, according to what you said.

Perhaps starting from scratch might be best - but to find all the original programs I need to install, data that'd need to be restored, etc. I'd like to see if just a new disk with a successful 'clone job' (image or real clone) might pass muster for now.

My main puzzlement is whether I could take the old drive from the laptop, use a new drive for the laptop - plug both into my desktop machine and clone/restore image/whatever - and secondarily, could I use the Acronis 15 I've got on the desktop, or in the intial stages of such operations it need to be doing it on the original laptop machine. Avoiding the laptop would be great, as it doesn't seem to like successfully completing most processes, and I think it might be toxic :)
 

USAFRet

Illustrious
Moderator


It is failing, because the laptop drive is failing. Doesn't matter where you put it...that drive is still failing.
And the more you mess with it, the sooner it will actually fail.