contemplating HDD to SSD

[august abolins]

Anyone here operating XP with an SSD?

My machine is currently hosting a 250GB drive, configured as:

C: = 35GB and <5GB remaining
H: = 197GB and 48GB remaining.

Without TRIM or Garbage Collection, would XP be a bad match for
an SSD upgrade?

At the very least, perhaps I could entertain a 1TB SSD as an
external device to conduct a full image backup or something.

I need to remain with XP just a little bit longer. I need to
work with MS Access 2007 and a few other familiar programs as a
minumum and can't migrate to different device at this time.

I have recently (within a 1yr or two) replaced the CPU fan of
the XP pc (a Thinkpad T60). The machine is otherwise quite a
fine performer and a pleasure to use. The keyboard is supreme.

[Mayayana]

"august abolins" <***@nospam.net> wrote

| Anyone here operating XP with an SSD?
|

I've been using several on 2 machines for several years.
I don't like to let disks get old enough to fail. There's no
problem with them. XP might even have an advantage. Newer
Windows versions are increasingly bloated with crap running
in the background. SSDs age due to writes.

You can get a 500GB SSD for about $50 if you look around.
Just don't buy on impulse at a place like Staples or Best Buy.
They'll gouge you.

We have two XP machines here, 2 Win7, and 2 Win10 laptops.
The XP's are the main computers. I take Win10 out of the
closet when I need to deal with a highly malfunctioning website
that Firefox 52 can't make sense of.

I've also use BootIt for years. About $40. It's very dependable
as a boot manager for multi-booting, a partitioning device,
copying partitions, etc. I also use it for disk image backup. My
XP disk imges are typically about 1.5 GB with all software
installed and configured. Then I backup data, like work files,
email, etc, separately, mirror it on a data partition, and copy
it occasionally to DVD. So if my hard disk died today it would
be a pain, but I could have it back up with nearly all files up
to date in an hour or two.

[Paul]

Post by august abolins
Anyone here operating XP with an SSD?
C: = 35GB and <5GB remaining
H: = 197GB and 48GB remaining.
Without TRIM or Garbage Collection, would XP be a bad match for
an SSD upgrade?
At the very least, perhaps I could entertain a 1TB SSD as an
external device to conduct a full image backup or something.
I need to remain with XP just a little bit longer. I need to
work with MS Access 2007 and a few other familiar programs as a
minumum and can't migrate to different device at this time.
I have recently (within a 1yr or two) replaced the CPU fan of
the XP pc (a Thinkpad T60). The machine is otherwise quite a
fine performer and a pleasure to use. The keyboard is supreme.

https://www.crucial.com/compatible-upgrade-for/lenovo/thinkpad-t60-series-%28type-6371%29

Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5-inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal SSD

So Crucial seems to think your drive is SATA type. 945GM/ICH7 is SATA II.
Which is fine.

If you buy the 1TB sized drive, that will provide enough incidental
spare provisioning, you won't have to worry too much about TRIM.
(By leaving a large portion of the drive unused, it gets used
for the free pool.)

I would want my Macrium CD, to "align while cloning" and clone the
partitions one at a time (drag-and-drop clone), so each can be aligned.
You click the Next button, then the Back button, after dragging the
first partition down to the target drive, then the Properties
link underneath the row, brings up this dialog box with 1MB alignment
capability. It would take two clone executions, plus potentially a boot
repair, to do the job.

http://updates.macrium.com/help/v5/partition_alignment.htm

And Lenovo may have already used the AHCI driver for the ICH7 chipset,
so you have a good choice there. While modern OSes, TRIM works
on either the native or the AHCI driver, I don't know if that
influences the potential success of doing TRIM on WinXP (somehow!).
The SSD Toolboxes, by and large, are poor quality pieces of
software, and I would not "bet the farm" on them.

For example, I checked the ADATA site, and their SSD toolbox has
a Win7 minimum OS requirement. That's why TRIM isn't likely to be
on the menu at the restaurant. You can see here, even seven years
ago, people were running around with their hair on fire.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/173482-can-windows-xp-pro-x86-safely-trim-an-ssd/page/2/#comment-1118340

Paul

[august abolins]

Hello Paul!

Post by Paul

Post by august abolins
Anyone here operating XP with an SSD?

https://www.crucial.com/compatible-upgrade-for/lenovo/thinkpad-t60-series-%2
8type-6371%29
Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5-inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal SSD

DONE. I had researched that one a little while ago too. It
should arrive on Friday.

Post by Paul
So Crucial seems to think your drive is SATA type. 945GM/ICH7 is SATA II.
Which is fine.

I thought the SATA interface for the T60 is first gen, SATA I.

Post by Paul
If you buy the 1TB sized drive, that will provide enough incidental
spare provisioning, you won't have to worry too much about TRIM.
(By leaving a large portion of the drive unused, it gets used
for the free pool.)

Good to hear that. The plan is to provide sufficient "spare
provisioning".

Post by Paul
I would want my Macrium CD, to "align while cloning" and clone the
partitions one at a time (drag-and-drop clone), so each can be aligned.

Interesting. I probably would not have considered that
approach.

Post by Paul
You click the Next button, then the Back button, after dragging the
first partition down to the target drive, then the Properties
link underneath the row, brings up this dialog box with 1MB alignment
capability. It would take two clone executions, plus potentially a boot
repair, to do the job.
http://updates.macrium.com/help/v5/partition_alignment.htm

Thx for that. Have to study the implications.

My current C: drive is 40GB, and H: partition is the rest of
the HDD. I hope that I can extend the size of the C:
partition on the SSD. I am not quite sure how to do that. Does
Macrium facilitate that?

Post by Paul
And Lenovo may have already used the AHCI driver for the ICH7 chipset,
so you have a good choice there. While modern OSes, TRIM works
on either the native or the AHCI driver, I don't know if that
influences the potential success of doing TRIM on WinXP (somehow!).
The SSD Toolboxes, by and large, are poor quality pieces of
software, and I would not "bet the farm" on them.

The plan is to eventually upgrade the XP OS to Win7/32. I
would think that Win7/32 would still be a fine performer with
3GB ram.
--
../|ug

[Paul]

Post by august abolins
Hello Paul!

Post by Paul

Post by august abolins
Anyone here operating XP with an SSD?

https://www.crucial.com/compatible-upgrade-for/lenovo/thinkpad-t60-series-%2
8type-6371%29
Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5-inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal SSD

DONE. I had researched that one a little while ago too. It
should arrive on Friday.

Post by Paul
So Crucial seems to think your drive is SATA type. 945GM/ICH7 is SATA II.
Which is fine.

I thought the SATA interface for the T60 is first gen, SATA I.

Post by Paul
If you buy the 1TB sized drive, that will provide enough incidental
spare provisioning, you won't have to worry too much about TRIM.
(By leaving a large portion of the drive unused, it gets used
for the free pool.)

Good to hear that. The plan is to provide sufficient "spare
provisioning".

Post by Paul
I would want my Macrium CD, to "align while cloning" and clone the
partitions one at a time (drag-and-drop clone), so each can be aligned.

Interesting. I probably would not have considered that
approach.

Post by Paul
You click the Next button, then the Back button, after dragging the
first partition down to the target drive, then the Properties
link underneath the row, brings up this dialog box with 1MB alignment
capability. It would take two clone executions, plus potentially a boot
repair, to do the job.
http://updates.macrium.com/help/v5/partition_alignment.htm

Thx for that. Have to study the implications.
My current C: drive is 40GB, and H: partition is the rest of
partition on the SSD. I am not quite sure how to do that. Does
Macrium facilitate that?

Post by Paul
And Lenovo may have already used the AHCI driver for the ICH7 chipset,
so you have a good choice there. While modern OSes, TRIM works
on either the native or the AHCI driver, I don't know if that
influences the potential success of doing TRIM on WinXP (somehow!).
The SSD Toolboxes, by and large, are poor quality pieces of
software, and I would not "bet the farm" on them.

The plan is to eventually upgrade the XP OS to Win7/32. I
would think that Win7/32 would still be a fine performer with
3GB ram.
--
../|ug

Macrium is not a full Partition Manager as such. But the
drag-and-drop mode, and doing the partitions one at a time,
achieves most of the necessary objectives. I don't
see a reason you could not drag and drop C: , align it,
plus extend it to a larger capacity than the current capacity.

The only problem I have with drag and drop, is sometimes I need
to use the boot repair function (which is only in a Macrium CD menu),
to make the OS boot again.

I don't really like to post-process SSDs for partition size,
because that costs you more write operations. It's a tiny bit of
extra wear, granted, but it's still a concern. So if I can get
things the way I want with a drag-and-drop series of sessions,
that's the way to go.

You could for example, do a clone without any drag and drop, but
then the alignment would be off, and the size would be off,
and getting it fixed with Paragon Partition Manager 14 Free,
I don't think they have a free align in there (because they want
to sell their $39 align program for that).

Some of the storage companies have a give-away align. WD might
give away WD Align, which is Acronis Align with their branding on it.
And that would work with a WD SSD. You could do align with one tool
as a post process, and resize partitions with Paragon. But if Macrium
will do it in one session, that might be a bit less wear on the SSD.

Macrium has quite a bit of a learning curve (even making the CD
is a pain in the ass). If you have experience with it, it won't be
quite so bad as if you're using it for the first time. it took
me quite a while to get used to it, and I was a bit slow picking up
the details (like finding that alignment thing was an accident).

When Macrium makes a CD, it has the ability to download a WADK kit
from Microsoft. Some people insist on trying to get some of the
older OS versions of that, and Microsoft has yanked some of the
files, seemingly damaging the download process Macrium wants to carry
out. I haven't done one of those in a while, to see if WinPE10
is the only one left or not. A later version, like a WinPE5 or
a WinPE10 from Microsoft, likely has a working USB3 driver for
connecting USB3 drives to USB3-equipped computers (faster backups).

WinPE (Portable Execution?) is an OS that boots as a RAMDisk
(drive letter X: for the OS). It has most of the bits of a regular
OS, but is not really intended for running random programs (or at least,
Microsoft didn't want you to get that for free particularly). It's
not an attempt to "not need a paying OS". It is missing volume
shadow copy for example, but that's not needed when you're running
from the CD anyway. It's not missed. When the CD boots, most all of
the materials needed for runtime, are stored in the RAM on the
computer, and if you wanted, you could even pop out the CD after
boot finishes.

Macrium includes a "fake" File Explorer as well
as a Command Prompt window, and those are handy for the odd thing.
I can use diskpart.exe in there and do a "clean" of a drive,
then do a refresh of the Macrium screen to take advantage of
the cleaned drive. There are a few little tricks like that, which
can be done from the CD. With an SSD, I would not use the diskpart
"clean all", because that would use 1/600th of the SSD drive life.
I have used "clean all" (zero entire HDD) with a hard drive, because
hard drives don't care about stuff like that. Cheap hard drives
do have a bit of a wear behavior, but the little bit you're doing
in a session like that won't hurt anything. The "clean" function
just removes the partition table. "Clean" doesn't wear the SSD.
it's at the KByte level (on GPT partitioned disks).

Paul

[august abolins]

Hello Paul!

Post by Paul
Macrium is not a full Partition Manager as such. But the
drag-and-drop mode, and doing the partitions one at a time,
achieves most of the necessary objectives. I don't
see a reason you could not drag and drop C: , align it,
plus extend it to a larger capacity than the current capacity.

I *do* hope I can extend the C: drive.

Post by Paul
The only problem I have with drag and drop, is sometimes I need
to use the boot repair function (which is only in a Macrium CD menu),
to make the OS boot again.

Uh-oh. Now I'm worried. Are you saying the cloning can result
in a non-bootable drive?

Post by Paul
You could for example, do a clone without any drag and drop, but
then the alignment would be off, and the size would be off,
and getting it fixed with Paragon Partition Manager 14 Free,
I don't think they have a free align in there (because they want
to sell their $39 align program for that).

What do you say about the comments here:

https://hardforum.com/threads/windows-xp-and-ssd-
alignment.1776760/

They seem to mention that there is another pgrm that can be
used for alignment: AOMEI. And there is a free edition for XP
as well.

Maybe I should extend the C: partition *first* on the HDD
before I do the cloning?


--
../|ug

[august abolins]

Hello Paul!

Post by august abolins

Post by Paul
You could for example, do a clone without any drag and drop, but
then the alignment would be off, and the size would be off,
and getting it fixed with Paragon Partition Manager 14 Free,
I don't think they have a free align in there (because they want
to sell their $39 align program for that).

https://hardforum.com/threads/windows-xp-and-ssd-
alignment.1776760/
They seem to mention that there is another pgrm that can be
used for alignment: AOMEI. And there is a free edition for XP
as well.
Maybe I should extend the C: partition *first* on the HDD
before I do the cloning?

BTW, I just tried AOMEI. It offers resizing my C: drive, but I
can only make smaller. :(

It *does* offer stealing the free space from another partion,
but I that's only available in the PAY version.

Meanwhile, I discovered THIS wrt to alignment:

https://www.howtogeek.com/270358/how-to-speed-up-your-solid-
state-drive-by-re-aligning-its-partitions/

I think it explains the alignment math the best, and the
program they suggest does it all automatically.

--
../|ug

[august abolins]

Post by august abolins
https://www.howtogeek.com/270358/how-to-speed-up-your-solid-
state-drive-by-re-aligning-its-partitions/
I think it explains the alignment math the best, and the
program they suggest does it all automatically.

NEVERMIND. The program they mention in the article is for Win7
and up.


--
../|ug

[Paul]

Post by august abolins

Post by august abolins
https://www.howtogeek.com/270358/how-to-speed-up-your-solid-
state-drive-by-re-aligning-its-partitions/
I think it explains the alignment math the best, and the
program they suggest does it all automatically.

NEVERMIND. The program they mention in the article is for Win7
and up.
--
../|ug

The msinfo32 program on WinXP, might not even mention
alignment. On Windows 7, that's an OS that supports a
new alignment property, so there is a readout to show
whether the old or a new alignment property is present.
That is why they would add an alignment property to
Vista+ msinfo32.exe programs.

There are two alignment reasons. On 512e (emulated drives,
not 512n native drives), the internal sectors are 4096 bytes.
The drive emulates the behavior of a 512 byte sector drive.
When the alignment is not a power of two there, the
file system clusters straddle a 4096 byte sector boundary,
so two operations are required on file boundaries, instead
of one. On a hard drive, that's a "speed penalty".

For an SSD, internal storage is on flash page boundaries.
If a file system cluster straddles two NAND flash pages,
it means extra work (and a bit more drive wear), to store
things. The flash pages might be 16KB or 32KB or so. More
modern OSes Vista+, started aligning partitions to
1048576 byte boundaries, in the hope this would work
better with SSDs and anything using NAND flash chip storage.
And this is the style of alignment recommended for
usage of SSD drives.

Getting WinXP to boot is pretty simple (relatively speaking).

partition1 partition2
+-----+--------------------------+------------------+
| MBR | C: drive | H: data drive |
+-----+--------------------------+------------------+
boot flag 0x80 = Active (Boot flag = 0)

1) Copy first 446 bytes of material in MBR (sector 0) to new drive.
2) Set boot flag on C: partition (stored in partition table of MBR).
3) Ensure boot.ini points to its own partition. If you dragged and
dropped the partitions in the wrong order, then it may be possible
to screw up the required ARC path.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/deployment/manually-edit-boot-file

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS <=== This is an "ARC Path"
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect

And that is about it for getting Windows to point to the partition.
Normally, when cloning, the ARC path is not botched. But it can be
if PowerQuest Partition Magic was used, years ago. It's more likely
a missing boot flag 0x80 would do it.

When you boot a cloned disk drive for the first time, the *original*
drive should be unplugged, just for the first boot. This has something
to do with selecting the wrong pagefile or something. Booting the drive
by itself, helps ensure "consistency" for subsequent boots.

Paul

[august abolins]

Hello Paul!

Post by Paul
Getting WinXP to boot is pretty simple (relatively speaking).

[...]

Post by Paul
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS <=== This is
an "ARC Path" [operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect

Yes.. I recall seeing something similar when I needed to get a
dual-boot system to cooperate. But that was ages ago now. I
don't really WANT to delve into manipulating data at that
level.

Post by Paul
Normally, when cloning, the ARC path is not botched. But it can be
if PowerQuest Partition Magic was used, years ago. It's more likely
a missing boot flag 0x80 would do it.

Perhaps it is because I haven't been hanging around tech forums
for years or because migrations from hdd to ssd have been going
rather well for most people, but I haven't heard of any issues
with the process required.

Post by Paul
When you boot a cloned disk drive for the first time, the *original*
drive should be unplugged, just for the first boot. This has something
to do with selecting the wrong pagefile or something. Booting the drive
by itself, helps ensure "consistency" for subsequent boots.

That is a given. The ONLY way to boot the cloned drive is to
have it installed in place of the original! :D
--
../|ug

[august abolins]

Hello Paul!

Post by Paul
Macrium is not a full Partition Manager as such. But the
drag-and-drop mode, and doing the partitions one at a time..
The only problem I have with drag and drop, is sometimes I need
to use the boot repair function (which is only in a Macrium CD menu),
to make the OS boot again.

What do you mean by "CD menu"? So, does Macrium need to be
booted from CD?

Sounds like your approach was to live-boot from CD into a
temporary OS "environment", and then do the cloning to the new
SDD that way?

Post by Paul
I don't really like to post-process SSDs for partition size,
because that costs you more write operations. It's a tiny bit of
extra wear, granted, but it's still a concern. So if I can get
things the way I want with a drag-and-drop series of sessions,
that's the way to go.

Right.. it would be nice to get it done right the first time.

Post by Paul
WinPE (Portable Execution?) is an OS that boots as a RAMDisk
(drive letter X: for the OS).

I saw that feature mentioned in the top menu of EaseUS.



--
../|ug

[Paul]

Post by august abolins
What do you mean by "CD menu"? So, does Macrium need to be
booted from CD?

The only place that Macrium has "Boot Repair" is on the emergency CD.

You can make a CD or a USB stick. Not all computers boot from USB,
but the newer ones do.

I have a USB stick in front of me now, and that's what I use
for things like Boot Repair. That was made while using a
Macrium 7 release.

Paul

[august abolins]

Hello Paul!

Post by Paul

Post by august abolins
What do you mean by "CD menu"? So, does Macrium need to be
booted from CD?

The only place that Macrium has "Boot Repair" is on the emergency CD.
You can make a CD or a USB stick. Not all computers boot from USB,
but the newer ones do.

The Thinkpad T60 can do a usb boot.

Meanwhile, some folks are suggesting that Clonezilla can
accomplish what I need. I would be booted from USB or CD.

[Paul]

Post by august abolins
Meanwhile, some folks are suggesting that Clonezilla can
accomplish what I need. I would be booted from USB or CD.

Clonezilla uses things like "ntfsprogs" for the things
it does. In effect, it scripts things using existing
programs. There may not be programs available specifically
for some of the functions. And one of those functions is
Windows boot repair. That's definitely not in there.

Your clever Clonezilla friends, will provide all the
command line you need to finish this project :-)

This is about as much fun as when someone tells me they've
been convinced by someone to do the entire job with "dd" (Disk Dump).
That's very amusing. Disk Dump has a place, but this isn't it.

Clonezilla is at least more "efficient" than "dd", because
it does Smart copies. But Acronis and Macrium also do smart
copies (only occupied clusters are copied).

It's the disk identifiers and the boot materials that
get poor treatment with the lesser tools. This is why
I did not bring these tools up. Clonezilla and "dd" are
for very experienced users who do this sort of work
regularly. Like, I did one "dd" preparation of a disk drive,
I did all the arithmetic with a hand calculator. It all worked.
But it was not pleasant, and I would not volunteer to do it
a second time.

I've also had source disks, where some of the geometry details
were wrong on the disk. Then, what do you do ? Like, you can have
overlapping partitions, or, you can have partition contents
which are larger than the envelope they're sitting in. I wasn't
able to fix those. The tools kept refusing. Even the consumer
programs may not handle a mess like that nicely.

Paul

[august abolins]

Hello Paul!

Post by Paul
This is about as much fun as when someone tells me they've
been convinced by someone to do the entire job with "dd"
(Disk Dump). That's very amusing. Disk Dump has a place, but
this isn't it.

The friend who walked me through dd to copy the stubborn C
drive over ONLY uses dd for his main clone copies. :/

Post by Paul
Clonezilla is at least more "efficient" than "dd", because
it does Smart copies. But Acronis and Macrium also do smart
copies (only occupied clusters are copied).

In my case, after Clonzilla failed the C partition due to
encountering bad blocks, it proceeded to clone H successfully.
After that process, the allocated spaces for the resized C and
H were automatically taken care of by Clonezilla.

The dd copy took care of the byte by byte copy of the original
35GB partition into its allocated 139GB space on the SSD. And
ntfsresize expanded the 35GB partition to fill the 139GB space.

Post by Paul
It's the disk identifiers and the boot materials that
get poor treatment with the lesser tools. This is why
I did not bring these tools up. Clonezilla and "dd" are
for very experienced users who do this sort of work
regularly. Like, I did one "dd" preparation of a disk drive,
I did all the arithmetic with a hand calculator. It all worked.
But it was not pleasant, and I would not volunteer to do it
a second time.

I guess my friend only wants to do a copy ONCE, and not have to
worry about failed copies aborting part way through. He's
alright doing the math if necessary.

Post by Paul
I've also had source disks, where some of the geometry
details were wrong on the disk.

That is one thing I did NOT have: source disks. This is XP
afterall. I purchased my T60 Thinkpad 2nd hand.

Post by Paul
Then, what do you do ? Like, you can have overlapping
partitions, or, you can have partition contents which are
larger than the envelope they're sitting in. I wasn't able to
fix those. The tools kept refusing. Even the consumer
programs may not handle a mess like that nicely.

I concur, that would be terrible to encounter overlapping
partitions if the human math was wrong. Thankfully,
Clonzilla's default multiple-choice questions Partclone program
did a fine job recognizing the target drive geometry and it's
"auto expand partitions proportionally" worked rather well to
set the the starting and ending points of each partition.

I have faith in Clonzilla now.

--
../|ug

[august abolins]

Hello Paul!

Post by Paul
The only place that Macrium has "Boot Repair" is on the emergency CD.

I downloaded Macrium, but it did not give me an option to
create an emergency CD. I could only run it live. Part way
thru the live clone, it failed with an error.

Post by Paul
You can make a CD or a USB stick. Not all computers boot from USB,
but the newer ones do.

I wouldn't have minded using Macrium booted on USB.

Meanwhile, I reverted to Clonezilla booted to a usb stick. The
clone operation was actually pretty straight forward if
accepting the defaults. It even offers to expand the existing
partions propertionally to fit the destination ssd. I did
that. But it encountered "bad" sections on C partion:

Loading Image...

And then it just proceeded to clone the h partion. The h went
without a hitch and completed in about 1.5hrs

--
../|ug

[Paul]

Post by august abolins
Hello Paul!

Post by Paul
The only place that Macrium has "Boot Repair" is on the emergency CD.

I downloaded Macrium, but it did not give me an option to
create an emergency CD. I could only run it live. Part way
thru the live clone, it failed with an error.

Post by Paul
You can make a CD or a USB stick. Not all computers boot from USB,
but the newer ones do.

I wouldn't have minded using Macrium booted on USB.
Meanwhile, I reverted to Clonezilla booted to a usb stick. The
clone operation was actually pretty straight forward if
accepting the defaults. It even offers to expand the existing
partions propertionally to fit the destination ssd. I did
https://kolico.ca/tmp/ccc.jpg
And then it just proceeded to clone the h partion. The h went
without a hitch and completed in about 1.5hrs

We're not off to a good start then. Hmmm.

*******

The Macrium Rescue interface, will vary with version.

[Picture]

Loading Image...

If you need to make USB media, rufus.ie website has a tool for
that, and uses some "syslinux" files as a boot wrapper. It can handle
WinPE based ISO disc images for you and make media.

*******

Clonezilla is telling you some of your WinXP clusters have
bad sectors in them.

Now you need multiple passes of ddrescue. The first pass
gets the easy-to-read sectors. Later passes work on the
missing bits.

Cygwin has a version of ddrescue and Linux has one (gddrescue package
in a Package Manager window).

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52235462/ddrescue-on-cygwin-creates-a-zero-size-image

Even on Cygwin, ddrescue would use the Linux namespace for drive partitions
or the whole disk drive. Cygwin would not need "sudo" in front, but Cygwin
would have to be running in an Administrator (elevated) window of some sort.

The following examples might work with a Ubuntu or a Linux Mint DVD as the booted OS.

sudo apt install gddrescue # perhaps this installs ddrescue in /sbin or /usr/bin ???

# No matter where you store the disc image (you can even store it on a
# second drive of matching or larger size), you will need enough space.
# Processing a 250GB disk drive would need 250GB of storage.

sudo ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdb /root/sdb_rescue.img /root/rescue.log

# Examine the LOG file for details. A large log file means
# there are many CRC errors.

gedit /root/rescue.log

# Now, the second pass reads the log, and concentrates only on the
# not-yet-captured sectors.

sudo ddrescue -d -f -r3 /dev/sdb /root/sdb_rescue.img /root/rescue.log

If you were doing drive-to-drive verbatim, it would look like this.

sudo ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /root/rescue.log # From disk management second to third drive
# Whole drive is processed

You can process a single partition on a drive, such as the first partition of drive SDB.
This syntax would assume drive SDC already "looks like" drive SDB,
and has a partition table that matches in its details (no mods to partitions!).

sudo ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /root/rescue.log # partition to partition rescue

With a lot of work, you can relate the offset on the disk (in the rescue.log)
to the damaged files. When my refurbished Optiplex had a bad drive, there
were four damaged sectors that could not be recovered, two sectors were in white space
(does not matter for cloning), two sectors were in system files. I had to scrounge up
replacement files, which is not easy.

*******

With such a command, you can easily damage the destination disk drive!
All it takes is a single syntax error while typing in the source
and destination pathnames.

I don't know if clonezilla has a copy of that built-in or not.
It's easier for a human to operate that software, than to write
a tool to parse the logfile and figure out a strategy from there.

*******

Summary: Now you're in serious trouble, depending on what file or files are lost.
This is no longer "a walk in the park".

The purpose of ddrescue, is to make multiple attempts to recover a sector.

The second command of the two, can be run multiple times, as you wish.

No matter which repair OS is used, the command must be elevated (root or Administrator)
to read a raw disk drive. It is best if the partition is not mounted (which is
why using Cygwin with respect to a damaged C: drive would not work and why
a Ubuntu or LinuxMint DVD booted, is recommended as the running OS).

Ubuntu and LinuxMint will run right off the DVD, *without* installing.

You still need storage space to work.

You cannot write to C: while you are working on it (reading it).
You cannot download the LinuxMint DVD onto your C: drive.
You cannot install Cygwin onto your C: drive.
A second computer may allow tool preparation (we call this
the Technician Computer, which is a computer in full working
order, with disk drive(s) having storage space to do repair work).

Part of the reason for so many rules, is that at this point,
we do not know how unhealthy the drive with the C: partition is,
and how much further "meddling" it will tolerate without croaking.

I had a drive once, that died soon after I started recovery work,
and I lost everything on there. That was a Maxtor 40GB drive from
the IDE ribbon cable days. That's what happens when you're too late.

The WD Blue 250GB I recovered on my refurbished Optiplex, that
worked out better. The drive errors were transient. A scan of the
drive today reveals no CRC errors, which is weird. The drive is *not*
in usage, so no matter how it tries to trick me, it's not going to be
used again. The contents now live on a WD Black 1TB.

Paul

[august abolins]

Hello Paul!

Post by Paul

Post by august abolins
https://kolico.ca/tmp/ccc.jpg
And then it just proceeded to clone the h partion. The h went
without a hitch and completed in about 1.5hrs

We're not off to a good start then. Hmmm.
*******
The Macrium Rescue interface, will vary with version.
[Picture]
https://i.postimg.cc/pLLLhqn1/Macrium7-rescue-disc-dialogs.gif

I had not idea to look in "Other Tasks" !!!!!

Anyway, the whole Macrium process is now moot. I uninstalled it
when I noticed that it preferred to be always running at bootup
and in memory as a couple of processes and popping up with the
"30 day Trial.." bubble on my taskbar.

I did the migration with Clonezilla's Partclone thru the
default (novice) settings with the "auto expand partions
proportionally".

It failed to do my C partion after it encountered some bad
blocks, but it proceed with H successfully.

Then.. with the help of a friend live on Telegram, I got help
with using the plain old "dd" command from the command line
boot to do a byte by byte copy of the C partition.

Then.. it was a simple matter to use the ntfsresize command to
get the original 35GB C partion to expand to the already
allocated 139GB space that was established when I selected the
"expand proportionally" option when I ran clonezilla.

Then, upon installing the SSD into the T60, Windows did NOT
originally report the C partition as the expanded size of
139GB, but another linux (debian) boot to the command line with
the Clonezilla program, and running ntfsresize -f -b /dev/sda1
FIXED the problem. That process automatically scheduled a
Windows chkdsk at the next reboot, and *then* I got the
official 139GB size of the C partition.

Post by Paul
If you need to make USB media, rufus.ie website has a tool for
that, and uses some "syslinux" files as a boot wrapper. It can handle
WinPE based ISO disc images for you and make media.

Yes.. I am familiar with rufus. I've used it when I was
exploring different distros. It came in handy to make the
Clonezilla boot USB.

Post by Paul
Now you need multiple passes of ddrescue. The first pass
gets the easy-to-read sectors. Later passes work on the
missing bits.

I have decided not to recover the few small sectors that are
still marked bad. The bad sectors aren't really real now that
I have migrated C onto the SSD.

Post by Paul
With such a command, you can easily damage the destination disk drive!
All it takes is a single syntax error while typing in the source
and destination pathnames.

I don't think I need ddrescue at this time.

Post by Paul
I don't know if clonezilla has a copy of that built-in or not.
It's easier for a human to operate that software, than to write
a tool to parse the logfile and figure out a strategy from there.

I'll check the next time I feel like booting to Clonezilla's
debian command line. But right now, it looks like the transfer
of my computing environment from the HDD to SSD has been a
success.

In other research, I was reading that ntfstruncate is the
better tool to recover the marked bad sectors on my newly
migrated C partition on the SSD since there are no bad memory
locations on a new SSD. But chkdsk's report that they only
total up to 14KB, I'm not going to fuss over that.

This whole process was quite a journey.

I *don't* really notice a SIGNIFICANTLY faster boot time in XP,
but [1] maybe coming out of hibernate, the system loads a bit
faster, [2] the fan is running at a slower speed, and [3] there
is NO fan-speed test at boot up on my T60.

--
../|ug

[😉 Good Guy 😉]

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