Hi,
I have a Windows 7 Home Premium x64 desktop computer with a 3 year old hard drive inside. I was having almost no problems for months (except for a persistent Action Center notification about a file being corrupted on the hard drive).
The hard drive has been continuously active since it was installed, I'm kind of surprised it lasted this long.
Fast forward to Feburary 2014, when Windows Internet Explorer was experiencing some sort of problem (I found out about it second-hand, after the computer was restarted to try to fix it, so I don't know what it actually was).
When Windows attempted to reboot, the hard drive was unable to start it in any mode (Safe Mode, Normal Mode, etc.) and it was continuously restarting.
After disabling automatic restart on failure in the F8 options, I found out Windows was blue screening due to an unmountable boot volume.
I created a System Recovery disk using the Backup and Restore function on another similar computer, and booted the damaged computer with it. I ran chkdisk on the drive, and it froze up at 11% of step 3 [or 4?] of 5. The drive was making a clicking noise over and over.
Leaving it alone for a few hours, it never completed. Also, on startup of the recovery disk it reported some files in the C:/Windows/Boot folder were corrupt.
So, I checked SMART statistics from a USB drive on which I had installed Linux for a class I was taking a few years ago.
The SMART statistics reported the hard drive had several crazy numbers, such as sectors in waiting to be remapped, 4019 bad sectors, etc. I don't have the numbers available to me, but if you need them I can check it again.
I put the drive in standby mode, unmounted it from Linux to prevent it being written to, and I concluded that the drive is dead.
It's not my computer, but my family's desktop.
They never invested in any backup solution, and as far as I know only the work files were ever backed up (installed software they probably don't have the disks or downloaded installers for anymore not to mention serial keys if any).
Would it be possible to use my Linux OS to mount the broken drive as read-only, buy a new hard drive and use some Linux program to clone the old disk to the new one?
Would doing so copy over the bad sectors leaving the new drive in the same state, or would it be possible to use chkdisk on the new drive after cloning and then reinstalling it in the system to repair the damaged files?
If not, any good recovery solutions for them to take a look at trying to get their OS back?
And furthermore, any good online system backup solutions for me to suggest to my family to sign up for when this might happen again?
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