Harddrive failing, thinking of replacing with an External.

Question are you using a dedicated external drive, or are you
using a new hard drive that you have connected via a separate
cable.

Did you create, and format the new drive?

If not plug it in and format it.

Using Aomei Backupper the process is so simple it should take it
about 20 minutes to complete the whole process of cloning one
drive to another.

Plug in the new drive in the usb port then turn on the computer.
Click on backupper, choose “disk clone” click on the source disk
it should light up,click next, click on the destination disk it should
also light up, click next, and you are away.


Alternatively you could create a system backup folder by simply
choosing backup then system backup step one will show you
the source disk, and step two should show c drive click start backup.

When finished restart the backupper choose restore, choose system backup 1
it will light up, click on path choose the external drive let it run
again it should complete in about 20 minutes

 

1. It's a dedicated external drive.
2. I didn't format the drive at first, I just cloned it. I assumed cloning formats the drive before starting the process.
3. I already cloned the disk using Aomei. It didn't take 20 minutes though, it took 9 hours at a rate of 30 MB/s. It's 931 GB after all.

I have one question about Aomei though... What is 'sector by sector' cloning? That's the option I chose. I tried leaving it unchecked at first but it gave me an error after a few minutes saying "write failed" or something of that sort.

 

Just format it again then follow the instructions I wrote.

You don't want to clone sector by sector because it copies the bad parts from the old hard drive.
sector by sector means byte byte including the bad stuff

That why it's failing!!

 

Did I make an irreversible mistake, possibly?
I will format it and clone again and hopefully it'll work this time.

 

You have "NOT" done any damage.


Think of hard drive as a music record with tracks.

On a record the music was produced by having a needle running in those tracks.

The music was made by little pits in those tracks, and the needle vibrating
over those pits made the music.

Well a hard drive has magnetic signals like the pits of the old music record,
and the magnetic signals are picked up by an arm floating above.


On a damaged hard drive the arm may have come in contact with the spinning
internal parts (disk) scratching it. “Damaging the sectors”

 

Oh I see
I knew how harddrives worked but I didn't understand what was meant by 'bad sectors'... I get it now. Done formatting and now waiting for cloning again... 3 hours to go (according to it).

 

Ok I got that same error again. What's happening? I'm lost. Is my external damaged? This is why I checked 'sector by sector' because it doesn't continue and gives me this error if I leave it unchecked.

 

I know it frustrating!!

The photo does show the program worked as it should.

It looks like it's referring to your internal drive files it confirms
your internal drive is broken and you wont be able to clone it.

You will now have to reinstall windows 10 to the new drive direct.
Format it then use your windows 10 copy.


Try to isolate the internal drive in the bios if you can, if not
you will have to direct the windows installation to only write
to the external drive.


An alternative way.


If I remember you said you had another machine with windows 7 on it
copy that system in the same way to the new external drive then update to windows 10.

 

Ah... Shame :/ I guess I'll have to give up on the comfort of not configuring everything from scratch.
At least I upgraded my PC to windows 10 yesterday so optimizing for my laptop shouldn't be a big problem.

Actually my PC's harddrive is 5 years old and has almost failed before (it refused to boot into windows so I had to reinstall the OS). It's been fine ever since but I don't want to encounter any more problems. I'll try to install windows on my external using my laptop... That's doable right? If I boot from DVD (windows 10 image) and install on the external, would that be fine?

 

Should be

 

Didn't work. Windows doesn't allow the option to install on USB drives apparently unless I have an Enterprise or Education version. Do you know of any work arounds?

 

I have never wrote so much, ha ha.

You will have to use backupper on your old pc to copy it's system to the external drive.

Then when the clone has completed plug the external drive in to the laptop.

Change the serial number, now Update the external drive system now to windows 10

 

Yea sorry for the long topic, I appreciate you walking me through this
I tried cloning my laptop's system, same problem. I'll try to clone my PC's system this time.

 

Ok I tried cloning my PC again and was still unable to boot up. So what I decided to do was disassemble the laptop, take out my old HDD, take apart the external enclosure and put it in its place. NOW it boots up normally without any issues, but the problem is the speed was still the same, only slightly improved. So I decided to install a fresh new copy of windows 10 on that drive, and now it's perfect!

I copied my old files to the new one and now I'm waiting for windows to finish updating. I was disappointed to find that the external was exactly the same model as my dying HDD. I really hope this one doesn't fail soon either.

So in the end I just gave up on the idea of booting from the external, I'm using it as an internal now instead. I'll use my old one as a backup external and keep it on a shelf.

 

If booting with an external drive is your concern, I don't get why you can't boot from a new USB instead of running two OSes at once. From your last picture, it looks like the software is okay, what's wrong is with your hard drive (bad sector). You can try to use the Windows disk check tool to fix it, but if it's because of the damages in the hard drive then you're out of luck. If you want to get a new HDD, I don't know if it is too late or not but I would recommend hybrid one. It has a small SSD portino (about 32GB) for system load and the rest are normal spinning hard drive, so it might fit your budget. Otherwise, I'd say change your internal HDD. A USB 2.0 port will make application load much slower.

 

It's ok. You may have not read my latest reply, but I took apart the external from its case and replaced it with the internal. I'm getting read/write speeds of 80 MB/s, which is more than I ever hoped for. I don't think my external is damaged. It's been operating flawlessly so far.