Turning physical HDD into a VHD file, when it has errors.

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richms

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#171456 19-Apr-2015 00:01

I have a pile of old HDDs, either too small to be any use, or just been upgraded to a SSD etc.

Anyway, want to dump them all to VHD files before I destroy the drives. Problem is most of them seem to have some form of unreadable sectors on them.

What is a good tool that will read the drives and make a mountable VHD file that windows can use if I ever want to see if I had something on them in the past? My old technique was to just make a VHD that was bigger than the drive and then clone it over in windows using some cloning tool I cant remember the name of.

Richard rich.ms

Lias

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#1287140 19-Apr-2015 11:58

One way would be to use a normal disk imaging tool that can happily ignore CRC/read errors, and then just restore the image within a VM.

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timmmay

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#1287160 19-Apr-2015 12:47

Macrium Reflect Free can do what you need, keeping an image, and it can be set to ignore bad sectors.. I guess it will retry for a while then give up and continue. Strongly suggest verifying the image after creation.

rphenix

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#1289773 22-Apr-2015 21:03

Ddrescue from any Linux rescue boot cd it skips bad areas till the non damaged areas are copied after that it repeatedly tries to get data from the damaged areas the transfer rate drops ad there's less that can be recovered I stop it once there's no data recovered in an hour then you have an image file which is easy to convert to vhd.