Hope someone can help. I have a Samsung Series 3 laptop (Win 7, with a Hitachi 500GB hard drive) that has failed to boot due to an error with the MFTs (Master File Tables). The hard drive also has some bad sectors. Obviously with unreadable MFTs the partitions will not mount. But I need to urgently make a clone or image to do recovery from. The data is still there, as I did a part clone (using Clonezilla) and managed to find quite a few files that look intact (but didn't continue with that as Clonezilla wanted to take a major amount of time for just a 100MB partition). Luckily I do have backups, unluckily I am still missing some more recent files that I want to recover (ones that need a specific file signature - which I managed to successfully create in R-Studio).
I am trying the demo versions of R-Studio and now R-Drive Image, to see if they will work or not before buying. R-Studio couldn't create an image (it went through the process but reported errors: illegal seek). So I presume this means it tried to mount the partition but couldn't?
R-Drive Image was, I think, the same situation doing a create image from partition to partition (sector by sector) for a couple of partitions took about an hour or two each. But whilst it was creating the images the light to the internal HD was not on, so again I think it couldn't access the partitions. The resulting .rdr images had nothing in them that I could find.
I am now doing a disk to disk copy (R-Drive Image), went through the menus and selected raw transfer to a target external drive of 1TB (and the internal HD light is finally on), unfortunately the estimated time of 1 hour 35 minutes (which sounded great) has now been extended (in the progress section) as being over 69 days and is still rising!
Obviously I can't leave it running for this long. The only other thing I can think of is maybe getting hold of a SATA cable and then connecting the 500GB hard drive to another computer might be faster, but I don't want to get into that unless there is no other way.So is there anyway I can make a clone/copy/image of an internal hard drive (RAW with bad sectors) to an extension drive, without it taking such a huge amount of time?
Thanks in advance for any help.