Windows 10: Cannot clone or image failing drive - how to proceed?

I have a Dell XPS studio 9100 (close to 10 years old!). This afternoon I got a bluescreen of death.
I rebooted and was greeted with a bios screen showing the SMART status of the 1.5TB boot drive is bad.
I had to disabled SMART checking in the BIOS in order to be able to boot the machine again and am trying to proceed with a backup. I have file history and EaseUS file level backups but no recent images which I can restore so I have been trying to clone the drive to avoid having to re-install a lot of software.

A clone operation using EaseUS failed with no explanation.
I tried Macrium Reflect which at least showed me what it was doing before it too failed. There are three partitions on the drive: a small OEM utilities partition, a 16GB Recovery Partition and the main C: Partition. The first two partitions cloned correctly but the clone operation on the main drive fails with the suggestion to run Code: chkdsk /r[/quote] chkdsk /r hangs at 11%. I stopped it after four hours...

Following some other suggestions I ran Disk Cleanup (oddly it showed 0 bytes to recover). Then, using elevated PowerShell I ran:

Code: sfc /scannow[/quote] That fails at 37% complete with the error: Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation.

So I am wondering what the best plan is.

1 - keep trying to repair the damaged drive so that it can be cloned or imaged.
2 - find another way to clone the damaged drive without repairing it first (given that it boots and works just fine [for now at least]).
3 - fresh install of windows on a new drive and then migrate.

Any thoughts on the problem, suggestions as to which approach to take and how to execute it would be greatly appreciated!

Many thanks,

b

:)

 

Failing HDD and Cloning

You seem intend on this install clean install windows when I have said windows does not run on that drive and TeraCopy doesn't even budge anymore.
for moving files from that drive. Then there are those that have suggested imaging and 1 or 2 that talked about cloning software.

I now have 3 HDDs left...

So nothing is copying, no cloning and imaging, now what?

 

Failing HDD and Cloning

Programs like Tera Copy can be useful for such tasks since they provide faster copying and they have a list of processed files. If it fails, you know instantly what file failed and you can also resume or restart file copy/move operations. Tera Copy is a free program so give it a try.

Cloning is for drives that are in perfect mechanical/electronic condition but have a corrupted partition or parasitic virus infection. You clone the drive and then you can repeatedly perform data salvaging tasks without the risk of degrading data and making it unrecoverable forever. If recovering fails, you just restore the drive and start all over.

Something you can't afford on failing drives, because they will interrupt the data cloning process. And when it fails, you have to do it all over again.

 

Failing HDD and Cloning

Physical damage then? If not even a software that is designed to skip over bad sectors can get what you're looking for then maybe that's it for this drive? I'm sure that there are experts on data retrieval out there that can take a shot at it but it's not guaranteed that they'll get anything out of it.

Did you try to just copy some files one at a time to see if the drive cooperates, as suggested? This old 320GB drive wouldn't copy folders but would do the contents of the folders one at a time.