Here's the situation:

I tried using a Clonezilla live usb to clone a failing hard drive to a backup drive. Just for clarity, the failing hard drive is in an external enclosure (sdc) and the backup drive is a solid state connected via sata (sda). sdc contained a Windows 8.1 installation. When I tried the clone, it cloned all the partitions except for sdc4 successfully. sdc4 is the parition with the OS installation. I tried cloning the sdc4 partition with clonezilla, but it failed there. I decided to eventually use ddrescue on the same livecd to clone just the partition as the rest of the partitions were able to copy over fine from the clonezilla clone. The command I ran was . It's at a point where it says 99.99% rescued but it's scraping bad-blocks. It also indicates that there is 0 non-tried data left. I don't have a lot of time at the moment to wait for the scrapping to complete.

My question is whether it is fine to cancel the clone at this point. The data lost at this point is very little and I can recover anything if there are discrepancies. What are the processes that occur after the scraping procedure? I'm a little nervous because I didn't set a logfile to log badblocks so I could restart where I left off.

When /dev/sdc4 contained the root partiton, then it might be the best to install the OS on the SSD again.

I was trying to avoid that. My goal is to be able to run chkdsk from a Windows 8.1 recovery environment usb and to not to take forever due to unreadable blocks. The problem is the computer the ssd is supposed to go into was initially preinstalled with Windows 8 but updated to 8.1. I'm just paranoid that reinstalling 8.1 won't accept the license. Now that I'm writing it, I think it should, but I just want to avoid reinstall at the moment.

You can cancel ddrescue at any time. The destination will contain everything that has been successfully read, and the blocks corresponding to unreadable source blocks will be left unchanged from whatever they contained before ddrescue was run. If you like, you can examine the mapfile to see what blocks were not successfully read, and then use techniques in the Bad Block HOWTO to determine which, if any, files might be affected.

1 members found this post helpful.

Just as an update, I cancelled ddrescue and it looks like the automatic repair checked and repaired the drives with the ssd plugged in. There seems to be some corruption with system and program files and I am investigating whether this is the case for user data.

I checked the user data and it looked like everything was there. I fixed the broken programs but either reinstall or updating. Some system utilities like dism and the backup system files in the win store seemed to be corrupted, but I think it was like that before I cloned.

1 members found this post helpful.