Last week I finally convinced myself that the external hard drive on my 211k was going bad. When I attempted to copy it using Linux, the partitions were shown as non-standard and Linux couldn't see the the recorded program files. In addition the second partition was unrecognized. Likewise Spinrite was not happy with the file structure of the partition with the program files and wouldn't attempt to correct my errors.
So to copy from my old drive to a new one, I had to resort to a sector by sector copy. Using the free program EaseUS Disk Copy Home, I was able to get the drive copied. The only bad part was that the process was very slow. According to my calculations, copying from a good 1 TB drive to another 1TB drive should take about 32 hours. However since my drive was having read errors, the program would stop whenever it encountered a sector read error. I would then choose retry until the drive was read with no error or ignore if the sector couldn't ever be read. If I hadn't been trying to retain all of the programs on my drive I could have chosen to ignore all errors which would have caused a full or partial loss of a certain amount of the programs. All in all I started on Sunday morning at 7:30 am and finished on Tuesday evening at 7:00 pm. I spent many hours monitoring the program to get past the read errors (while doing other things of course). Also the drive had a certain amount of defective sectors (always in groups of eight) which I would think would have been marked unreadable during the format process.
All in all the copy process worked even though it took a good bit of time. I spot checked several programs and all seemed to be okay. Of course with over 670 programs only time will tell if they all survived.
So to copy from my old drive to a new one, I had to resort to a sector by sector copy. Using the free program EaseUS Disk Copy Home, I was able to get the drive copied. The only bad part was that the process was very slow. According to my calculations, copying from a good 1 TB drive to another 1TB drive should take about 32 hours. However since my drive was having read errors, the program would stop whenever it encountered a sector read error. I would then choose retry until the drive was read with no error or ignore if the sector couldn't ever be read. If I hadn't been trying to retain all of the programs on my drive I could have chosen to ignore all errors which would have caused a full or partial loss of a certain amount of the programs. All in all I started on Sunday morning at 7:30 am and finished on Tuesday evening at 7:00 pm. I spent many hours monitoring the program to get past the read errors (while doing other things of course). Also the drive had a certain amount of defective sectors (always in groups of eight) which I would think would have been marked unreadable during the format process.
All in all the copy process worked even though it took a good bit of time. I spot checked several programs and all seemed to be okay. Of course with over 670 programs only time will tell if they all survived.
