Clonezilla extreme time consumption

clonezillahard driventfs

First time using Clonezilla. I need to clone 500GB disk, 16MB cache, to another which is exactly the same type.
Source disk is in SATA1, destination Disk is in SATA0.
Source disk is containing Win7 64bit in NTFS. No other filesystems. One partition (visible).

Because the source disk, according to S.M.A.R.T. data, contains 199 unrecoverable sectors, I started sector-by-sector with -recover option enabled in expert mode.

The problem is, recovery is running right now for 18(!) hours. Screen is constantly refreshing, disks are making working noise.

Screen looks like this:
clonezilla screenshot

And is nonstop refreshing and the counting in far left is rising.

So my question is:
Is this completely broken process which I should cancel, or is this normal behaviour?

Thank you for your advices.

EDIT:
I found out that this screen is simply repeating. It always shows sector 6543957. Sorry I did not notice this earlyier.
So apparently Clonezilla got stuck at some point.
I really would like to clone this disk. What now? 🙂

Best Answer

disk operation on a hard drive containing bad sectors is VERY SLOW . Suggest to give up the contents if they are not crucial ( re-install OS on other drive )

Related Solutions

Clonezilla not able to mount drive

I had the same issue, so I tried to to mount it manually in shell

mount -t auto /dev/sda5 /home/partimag

But then I got error about device being in RAID. I gave up with clonezilla and used dd instead.

NTFS – How to Unmark an NTFS Cluster as Bad

I'll answer the title question nothing more.¹

First, do note that, if the sector is truly bad, unmarking it won't make it readable. So your cloning software is likely to choke on reading it instead.

In NTFS, a cluster is marked as bad by assigning it to a special stream, $BadClus:$Bad, a sparse file.

What you need is to

edit its runlist to remove the corresponding allocated block(s)
mark the corresponding cluster(s) as free in $Bitmap.

To unmark all bad blocks, there's ntfsfix -b -d (-b=clear bad block list, -d=clear/don't set "dirty" flag) (another method with ntfstruncate does exactly the same²).
- It might introduce minor inconsistencies into metadata (in my case, a few indices apparently became unsorted), I'm not sure why, so either run chkdsk -f by hand or omit -d to trigger it at Windows startup if / in case you get FS errors.
To clear a specific block is much more difficult since I didn't find any existing software that can do this out of the box³. NTFS Bad Sectors Resolution: The $BadClus metafile - Katy's code describes the way - basically, it's editing the runlist and bitmap by hand.

¹ _{Only because handling bad sectors + NTFS + cloning is too broad a topic. I'll gladly answer ones directly related to the matter at hand.}
² _{checked the source code of ntfsfix v2015.3.14.}
³ _{for the insistent ones, these can't do it: ntfscat(can't read unreadable sectors),ntfscp(can't write to offset), ntfstruncate,ntfsfallocate,dd(can't open $BadClus:$Bad for writing)}

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