Hard disk crash and recovery
Hard disk failure
My hard disk drive started to slowly degrade. Windows boot up time grew longer and sometimes the hard drive was crunching something for 5 - 30 seconds. Later on the crunching time was between 5 - infinity. Then it was clear that something is wrong with the drive rather than Windows or some background process doing some useless disk scanning every once in a while.
The hard disk brand was Seagate Barracuda 320 GB 7200 RPM. Some time earlier I had bought 500 GB Samsung disk where I planned to completely restore the failing disk. I had about 280 GB data stored to the disk including Windows partition (30 GB) and 290 GB for data.
Hard disk backup attempt
For backing up completely the whole 320 GB hard drive to the new 500 GB hard drive was the initial plan. For doing that job there are lots of tools. One of the most well known is Norton Ghost utility. Norton Ghost can (or it should) copy hard disk to another. When copying hard disks there is even option to copy MBR which is necessary for moving Windows from disk to another.
Copying the old hard disk to the new one took little less than 3 hours with Ghost. I then removed the old hard disk and tried to boot with the new hard disk. Everything went fine until Windows logon screen came up and the system failed to proceed forward. Norton Ghost had failed.
Hard disk recovery
The more “hack-like” solution is to use Linux tools to copy hard disk. Linux is a good tool for this kind of operations because there are lots of CD-bootable distributions. I can boot Linux from CD and then do whatever I need to do to backup my data. This is also the somewhat harder way because the handling hard disk drives with Linux commands is not something that people have to deal with often. Thus it’s harder to learn than for example Norton Ghost’s easy graphical user-interface. Still, the basic idea is not hard at all - the hard part is figuring out that there exists such commands which can do hard disk backupping stuff in Linux. If the command is known then it’s easy.
The magical command is dd. By dd it’s possible to handle hard disk operations as if all the stuff in the disk was just bits and bytes. Dd doesn’t differentiate between boot sector or image - both are just data.
I used Knoppix as the “bootable live system”. Any other Linux release which has “bootable live system” can do the same thing. The live system boots Linux console or even graphical user-interface where the backup commands can be executed.
The magical command with parameters is
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=4k
The hard disk was copied about 70 MB / s which took about an hour to complete. After doing this I removed again the old hard disk and booted with the new. Everything worked! Where Norton Ghost fails a 28 kilobyte dd program succeeds.
End note
Miscellaneous note: Very good tool to analyze hard disks seems to be program called SpinRite. There are two good video clips of the author telling how the software works. While looking for these links I accidentally found the following: SpinRite is 80% hype, 10% dangerous, and 10% real substance. I have not used this program earlier so I do not know whether it actually is what it promises but Steve seems to know what he is talking about.
