Backing up Hard Drive?

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I have a laptop with a hard drive that is going bad (diagnosed by dell
tech.). They are sending me a new one. I have an external hard drive that I
have been atempting to back the drive up on. I already have the documents
and settings backed up so I am not worried about loosing data, but would like
to have the whole drive so that when I get a new hard drive I can just
reinstall it. The problem is that when I attempt it cant seem to make it all
the way through (11gb). It usually crashes at around 2-4gb. Is it even
possible to transfer the contents of one drive to another? If so can I do it
incrementally? Can someone walk me through the best way to handle this.
Thanks
 
Depends on how your doing it.

Yes, you can back up a drive(WinXP Backup should work) and you can also
image (requires third party applications) the drive. However, if your trying
to use a copy command it will not work.
 
You don't say how you are backing, making it much harder for anyone to help
you. If the drive is failing, whatever method you're using might be
hitting a bad sector. Have you run chkdks /r to scan for an mark out bad
sectors?
 
I used WinXP Backup but it can't get all the way through, probably a bad
sector. Any suggestions?
 
I am using WINXP backup. The problem is that I can't get all the way through
a backup. I am sure that there is a bad sector, but is there a way to remove
them? Will a bad sector cause the backup to crash?
 
Run chkdsk /f from a command prompt

start -->run---. cmd

It will ask you if you want to run it at the next startup. Answer yes.
 
It's possible that hitting a bad sector(s) might crash ntbackup. Run chkdsk
/r in a command prompt. Say yes to the prompt to run on reboot. Reboot and
let it run to scan for bad sectors. This will be time consuming. If bad
sectors are encountered it will attempt to retrieve their data and will mark
them as out of service. The Winlogon event in event viewer Application
events will show the result if you miss it onscreen. If bad sectors were
found and marked, try rerunning ntbackup and it may now complete.
--
 
GTS said:
It's possible that hitting a bad sector(s) might crash ntbackup. Run chkdsk
/r in a command prompt. Say yes to the prompt to run on reboot. Reboot and
let it run to scan for bad sectors. This will be time consuming. If bad
sectors are encountered it will attempt to retrieve their data and will mark
them as out of service. The Winlogon event in event viewer Application
events will show the result if you miss it onscreen. If bad sectors were
found and marked, try rerunning ntbackup and it may now complete.
Click to expand...


Alternatively you could try Gibson Research's Spinrite 6. I had a
similar problem where Ghost was stopping part way through backing up a
failing drive. I ran Spinrite on it twice and the second time it found
no errors. Ghost then ran fine and I was able to move everything to a
new drive.
I have been using Spinrite since version 1 and have never had a problem
with it. The newest version includes support for NTFS drives.
 
I had ran a check for bad sectors in the past and it found a few. Had not
tried that since it crashed during backup, but did last night and found one
more. After that I attempted to back up(from my NTFS laptop) onto a
networked desktop with a fat32 hard drive. I it did not crash but said there
was a space limit (~4gb) on fat 32 drives and could not continue (my fat 32
drive has over 20gb of space available and I am putting 10 on it). Know
anything about this? Can I split the backup between 3 files?
 
FAT32 has a file size limit of 4GB. ntbackup does not have a capability to
split the backup into multiple files. Your options are to convert the
target drive to NTFS (assuming it's not a Win 9X machine), manually do
multiple selective backups with ntbackup, or use other backup software.
Whatever you do, do it fast. The progressive development of bad sectors
indicates catastrophic failure may come any time.
--
 
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