Try running DiskFresh on it once, then attempt another image.

Hmm, that's a new one. Have you used that before yourself? Seems a bit dangerous.

Yeah, I use it regularly. It's safe. Completely non-destructive, it just re-writes the data back to the same location, so if there's a weakened magnetic or electrical (SSD) signal, it is "refreshed". Maybe Macrium Reflect is hitting a spot on the drive with "weakened" data and crapping out? Worth a shot 😀

How healthy is the drive you are imaging, if all else fails Norton Ghost might get the job done and it can image defective drives if the heads can read the data well enough.

Like I said, the drive was healthy enough to survive being imaged once already, and chkdsk isn't complaining at all. I read about wmic diskdrive get model,status today and there's nothing wrong there either.

I would have to pay for or pirate Norton Ghost if I went with that. Actually I have an ancient version of that kicking around somewhere, but I doubt it would be any more suitable than Macrium or Paragon or partimage.

I use Clonezilla too (have you tried that yet?), and there has been an occasion or two where it would fail on the imaging part until I ran SpinRite on the drive first. SpinRite works similarly to DiskFresh, but also has a sector recovery mode if it comes across bad sectors (DiskFresh just tells you it came across bad sectors).

Jorpho wrote:

Like I said, the drive was healthy enough to survive being imaged once already, and chkdsk isn't complaining at all. I read about wmic diskdrive get model,status today and there's nothing wrong there either.

I would have to pay for or pirate Norton Ghost if I went with that. Actually I have an ancient version of that kicking around somewhere, but I doubt it would be any more suitable than Macrium or Paragon or partimage.

Have you used HDtune with it recently to do a surface scan? When I can't image with Macrium there is always some sort of fault, you may have to cough get Norton as it worked for me saving a win 3.1 install from a ruined drive. That drive was bad enough that it took more than 4 hours to scan 10% of the drive before I gave up!

Well, DiskFresh (after running for eight hours) claims to have found 144 "bad or inaccessible" sectors – but is that inevitable? Aren't there some sectors that Windows will fervently protect as long as Windows is running? Is there a program you would suggest for translating the sector numbers into filenames? (I think I've used something like that before, but cannot recall what I specifically used.)

I've used HDD Regenerator for some time now. Works pretty good on damaged surface "refresh" like this.

Jorpho wrote:

Well, DiskFresh (after running for eight hours) claims to have found 144 "bad or inaccessible" sectors – but is that inevitable? Aren't there some sectors that Windows will fervently protect as long as Windows is running? Is there a program you would suggest for translating the sector numbers into filenames? (I think I've used something like that before, but cannot recall what I specifically used.)

What is supposed to happen is that when the PC is "made aware" of bad sectors, it informs the HDD and the controller swaps spare sectors in, marking those sectors bad so they won't be re-used. If there is data on those sectors, they need to be moved to the remapped sectors. But sometimes the HDD doesn't do its job, or the damage to those sectors is too much to be able to move the data. That's where I use SpinRite, as it will move that data to spare sectors if the HDD controller can't. Unfortunately, it's not freeware. It's an $89 license. Looks like HDD Regenerator costs the same, but I'm not familiar with it.

What brand is your HDD? If it's Seagate, try running SeaTools fitness tests on it maybe? Or if another brand, maybe they have their own utility.

Another option is to get another HDD and restore your Win7 image to it, then upgrade to Win10.

edit: even if you're able to recover your data from those sectors, you won't be able to image the drive until the bad sectors are fixed (by swapping to spares) or you replace the HDD.

Well, same thing happened with Macrium after running DiskFresh. I did happen to notice this time that after it reaches 90%, the "estimated time" just gets longer and longer before it gives up entirely. I should also probably add that the Windows 10 installation is significantly smaller than the Windows 7 installation I backed up and restored.

I guess there are still a lot of other things I can try now, so thanks for that.

What about Windows' own System Image Backup?

P.S. In Win10 it can be found under the awkwardly named "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)"

Partimage comes back with the considerably more helpful "Can't read block 54157106 from image (135020224)". So, mad props to Partimage for actually returning useful information thar. That is, unfortunately, nowhere near the sectors that DiskFresh reported as unaccessible.

System Image Backup in Windows never played nicely on my main PC; I think it had something to do with the Microsoft Office Starter "Click-to-Run" functionality, but i never got to the bottom of it.

The drive is a Fujitsu, according to Device Manager.

Jorpho wrote:

Partimage comes back with the considerably more helpful "Can't read block 54157106 from image (135020224)". So, mad props to Partimage for actually returning useful information thar. That is, unfortunately, nowhere near the sectors that DiskFresh reported as unaccessible.

System Image Backup in Windows never played nicely on my main PC; I think it had something to do with the Microsoft Office Starter "Click-to-Run" functionality, but i never got to the bottom of it.

The drive is a Fujitsu, according to Device Manager.

Sectors and blocks are not the same:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_sector#Sec … s_versus_blocks
It could be PI and DF are telling you about the same region, but different locations within that region. It could also be that the unreadable area is growing. That tends to happen once a drive starts to develop bad sectors, it can grow like a cancer.

Fujitsu has a DOS diagnostic utility:
http://support.ts.fujitsu.com/content/Quickse … stemdiagnostics

What size is your hard drive?

Fair enough. fdisk -l reports a sector size of 512 bytes; blockdev reports a block size of 4096. The partition is 272.6 GB.

The sectors in the DiskFresh log are in the range of 433,000,000 - 436,000,000.

Thank you for that Fujitsu link; that sounds like a good place to look next.

I figured I should report back in here.

The Fujitsu utility was not much help at all – it just produced some inscrutable diagnostic code which I didn't bother to write down, but I think it wouldn't have translated to anything more useful than "disk read error".

I was able to borrow SpinRite from somewhere. It ran for two hundred and thirty eight hours and managed to find 240 uncorrectable sectors. Afterwards Macrium was finally able to complete an image of the drive. "wmic diskdrive get model,status" still reports OK.

Why exactly chkdsk /r /f couldn't do the job, I have no idea.

Welp, guess it's time to install the Anniversary Update now.

Wow, that SpinRite looks like some seriously good recovery tool. Just short of ten days though... Did it ever look like it hangs, or is there always an indicator to show that it's still working?

Jorpho wrote:

Welp, guess it's time to install the Anniversary Update now.

Are you sure? 😁

archsan wrote:

Wow, that SpinRite looks like some seriously good recovery tool. Just short of ten days though... Did it ever look like it hangs, or is there always an indicator to show that it's still working?

In its idle state, it has a "screen blanker" mode in which a small window will slowly change positions around the screen; the small window includes a nice little spinny indicator to show that it is still running. My major complaint is that it also uses the PC speaker: it makes a shrill little squawk (in only the way that the PC speaker can) when it hits a trouble spot and goes into data-recovery mode, and thereafter will make a quiet little tick every now and then while it analyzes the sector. I suspect it has been disrupting my sleep patterns for the last week. There seems to be no way to shut it off!

My other complaints are that I suspect the vast majority of its time was spent frantically doing its very best to recover data from sectors that the operating system had already marked as unused and whose data could have been safely discarded. Also, you apparently need to specify that you want to save a log file before you start running it – if you forget and want to log its findings after it finishes, you're stuck taking pictures of the screen. (?!) But at least it gets the job done, apparently.

Nice! Yeah, SR has its good and bad points, but depending on how important the data is, it can be a life saver and way cheaper than professional data recovery. I've had it fix a drive with one bad sector in a few hours, so I can see how 240 bad sectors would take so long. Are you going to keep using that drive?