Hey, anyone who might know how to solve my problem. My friend recently had is HDD in his laptop fail I was wondering if there is any possibility of creating a clone of this hard drive onto a new hard drive?
The hard drive shows up in windows when I connect it to another computer but it just scans the drive endlessly. If it happens to finish scanning it the drive appears to have no data in it. I have used programs like TestDisk and Photorec to recover massive amounts of files, but I want to create an exact clone of the disk and copy it to a new one. Thanks to anyone who may have a solution.
if it fell it is most likes dead and gone
It didn't fall at all, he was using it fine like normal and apparently his system locked up followed by that annoying oscillating error noise then it shut down. When he rebooted the laptop said there was no hard drive detected. I am assuming it just died because he did run the machine quite a lot but it was mainly left idle and in hibernate. The cooling on the laptop was very good and he has never overheated the machine.
i mise read then yes you can make a cone drive but it is a pane in the but.
what i recommend doing is monte the drive in another computer that have a os
windows : go the disk manager is the start button
ps i don't know linux
next mark the partition as active
than get the date off the personal data and put it on a flash driver or another hard drive this can be a bit difficult to get over to the new dive if the laptop doesn't have a esata plug
next reinstall windows on a new hard drive redownload everything
I only have limited experience with data recovery, but until you know why the drive failed simply cloning it might not be the best choice. I'd recommend simply copying/recovering important files to a new drive.
If you have spare disk space, ddrescue in reverse mode works wonders, though it can take a very, very long time. Then you can mount a copy of the recovered disk image and attempt recovery of important files to a new disk. Just mounting the disk directly can potentially do more harm if the disk is faulty, because of background writes the operating system makes during normal operation (even if mounted read-only). Find a good tutorial on how to use ddrescue.