Disk Clone fails on CRC/bad sectors - Will Spinrite help?

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falcondrum

New member
Jan 23, 2025
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I have been attempting to clone a internal Samsung 1TB SSD drive, which has many bad sectors. Will Spinrite sufficiently 'do it' magic' to allow a cloning tool to work? I have used Spinrite back in the 90's on physical spinning drives for various reasons with great success, but this is a different time/use-case. Thanks in advance for your responses!

Clone tools tried:
  • EaseUs Partition Master and Disk Copy
  • Macrium Reflect
  • MiniTool Partition Wizard
  • ddrescue
  • hddsuperclone

As you can see, I've exhausted myself trying to clone the drive....

All fail when attempting to read the bad sectors. The Destination drive is a USB-C connected M2 SPCC SSD VF10 in a Dockteck case, which will eventually be put inside the laptop, replacing a secondary, smaller M2 drive.

-Matt
 

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What do you mean by clone a drive. If it has errors, you want a tool to fail fast on errors and skip them while allowing cloning everything that doesn't have errors.

I suspect there are tools that can do this, but I don't expect they're going to be free to use, because data recovery is a business that makes its profits off users who don't have backups.

SpinRite can do two things you might be interested it. It will spend time on the bad sectors trying to get the drive to read them. That used to work with HDDs because of mechanical variability, but I don't have the sense that will help with SSDs, but one never knows until they try. In its default configuration, SpinRite will eventually either succeed to read/rebuilt the LBA and rewrite it. In your case it's more likely it will fail and then will want to write zeroes to that LBA. Assuming the drive will accept that write, that would kill the error, but also lose any data that was there. (I assume it's already lost, so this may not be any actual loss.)

If you KNOW you don't even want to try to recover the bad sectors, you can tell SpinRite from the command line not to even try to do recovery, which will immediately cause bad sectors to be written with zeros. (Again, assuming the drive will accept such a write successfully.)
 
Will Spinrite sufficiently 'do it' magic' to allow a cloning tool to work?
As PHolder noted, data may already be lost and no longer recoverable. Before turning Spin Rite loose on this drive, I would first try to copy every file possible off of the drive. Some files - obviously - will not be fully readable or therefore copy-able.

Once you have copied all that you can, then try a SpinRite Level 2 scan. It may recover some sectors, perhaps allowing another file or two or more to be copied off of the drive. Some sectors will likely be unrecoverable however.

You could then do a SpinRite level 2 scan with dynastat 0 to clear any remaining BAD sector errors. Any unwriteable sectors should be reallocated by the drive's firmware. Finally, a SpinRite level 3 scan would refresh all "good" areas of the drive, maximizing drive performance.

All of this may be moot however. I noticed that the bad sectors appear randomly spread around the drive, per the surface scan image. This suggests that the drive may be experiencing random NAND failures. You have not said how old the drive is, what the current powered on hours are (SpinRite would tell you this on the drive enumeration screen), or how slow the drive's performance has been. I would expect drive performance to slow to a crawl anytime a bad area is encountered. I would question the feasibility of storing any important data on this drive from now on.
 
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Thanks guys, I suspected what you have said about marking as bad, but how different is that from a CHKDSK c: /r?. The drive 3 yrs old, and still under the 5yr warranty. It’s ridiculous how many errors are on this drive.
Anyway, I will copy off the data to another drive. Even though these sectors are marked as bad, I was hoping that Spinrite could assist so that I could clone the drive(or maybe migrate is the correct term) to a new drive. [OS, programs, data]
I don’t want to reload the OS (Windows 10 + many programs) all,over again. Advice?

Thanks guys!
 
You say it's under warranty - what does Samsung support say?

I presume they'll swap it, but you want the data, hence the clone, first.

Here's what I have done:

  1. Samsung Magician, if it updates the firmware ( thank you @ColbyBouma ) and or fixes the drive, you may win right there.

  2. Download SpinRite 6.1 https://www.grc.com/upgrade.htm and run SpinRite NoRewrite NoRAMTest Level 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 with or without DynaStat 0, DynaStat 1 or default ( equal to DynaStat 5 ).

  3. Download and run NFI C: sectornumber for any sector that the SpinRite LOG says is not fully readable or recoverable or rewritable, see below for more on NFI.

  4. If NFI says that the sector is to a file you don't care about, move on.

  5. If NFI says that the sector is to a file you care bout, run SpinRite NoRewrite NoRAMTest Level 2, 3, 4 or 5 again, on ONLY one sector at a time, with or without DynaStat default or any DynaStat value you can tolerate waiting for, though DynaStat 1 has generally produced enough samples to satisfy me without waiting forever.

  6. If that fails, try SpinRite NoRAMTest Level 2, 3, 4 or 5 and accept the possible loss of data, again on only the sectors in question, and again with DynaStat default or DynaStat 1

  7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 above for each sector identified in the SpinRite LOG as not being fully readable, recoverable, or rewritable, this may be time consuming, but hey, what else are we gonna do? If there is a range of sectors, it may be convenient to specify the range and go away instead of running a lot of individual sectors manually, I have no hesitation and great success and never any data loss running a Level 5 on an entire SSD. I note some SSDs respond better under Level 4, and XFER 1024 or XFER 2048, or ForceBIOS - experiment.

  8. If the clone target has overwhelming errors, update Windows in place after cloning, and try free Tweaking.com Windows Repair, a nice suite of resetting tools https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/tweaking_com_windows_repair_portable.html
Alternatively, I just copy out the data itself using OS Operating System level tools, such as free RoboCopy /xd /xj /w:0 /r:0 <-- 'retry how many times', not clone, not worrying about every byte of data not of interest to me, such as any replaceable OS Operating System file or reinstallable program files.

Though I hate to reinstall everything, at some point, it's faster than endless recovery and endless fixing failures.

Others offer iterative DDRescue experience ( I have none ).

- - - - -

* NFI.exe = Microsoft Corporation Sector to File Mapping Program 3.00.2093.1 1998-1999, free
Code:
C:\>nfi /?
NTFS File Sector Information Utility.
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1999. All rights reserved.

Dumps information about an NTFS volume, and optionally determines
which volume and file contains a particular sector.

Usage: nfi drive-letter [logical-sector-number]

            Drive-letter can be a single character or a character followed
            by a colon (i.e., C or C: are acceptable).

            Logical-sector-number is a decimal or 0x-prefixed hex
            number, specifying a sector number relative to the volume
            whose drive letter is given by drive-letter. If not
            specified, then information about every file on the volume
            is dumped.

       nfi NT-device-path physical-sector-number

            Determines which volume a given physical sector on a drive is
            within, and then which file on the volume it is in.

            NT-device-path is the NT-style path to a physical device.
            It must not include a partition specification.

            Physical-sector-number is a decimal or 0x-prefixed hex
            number, specifying a sector number relative to the physical
            drive whose device path is given by NT-device-path.

        nfi full-win32-path

            Dumps information about a particular file. full-win32-path
            must start with a drive letter and a colon.

Let us know how it goes.

,
 
Last edited:
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A followup to my previous post and the long post by peterblaise.

- I would recommend NEVER using level 5 on a solid state drive (SSD). L5 was developed for spinning rust drives, decades before SSD's came to be. L5's excessive write activity is very stressful for an SSD and in my considered opinion provides no advantage whatsoever over a level 3/4 scan. (L4 = L3 with a final verification read).

That 1 TB SSD of yours appears to be a troubled drive. A Level 5 run could push it over the edge and turn it intro a paperweight.

- Using Samsung Magician to update the SSD's firmware is a good thing to try.

- Running an initial SpinRite L2 screen with the NoRewrite command line parameter would prevent SpinRite from rewriting any sector that has NOT been FULLY recovered, thus preserving any data in said unrecoverable sector.
 
- Using Samsung Magician to update the SSD's firmware is a good thing to try.
I remember in the past that firmware updates came with warnings about all data being erased. Did manufacturers stop doing that? It's been a while since I've updated an SSD's firmware :D
- Running an initial SpinRite L2 screen with the NoRewrite command line parameter would prevent SpinRite from rewriting any sector that has NOT been FULLY recovered, thus preserving any data in said unrecoverable sector.
I highly recommend NoRewrite as well if you think you might want to send this drive to a data recovery service.
 
...A followup to ... the long post by peterblaise. - I would recommend NEVER using level 5 on a solid state drive (SSD). L5 was developed for spinning rust drives, decades before SSD's came to be. L5's excessive write activity is very stressful for an SSD and in my considered opinion provides no advantage whatsoever over a level 3/4 scan. (L4 = L3 with a final verification read). That 1 TB SSD of yours appears to be a troubled drive. A Level 5 run could push it over the edge and turn it intro a paperweight ...

Great to have a variety of points of view to explore.

Mine is based on experience, pulled out and repeated here for anyone who may have skimmed through the 8 steps without looking at details:

"... I have no hesitation and great success and never any data loss running a Level 5 on an entire SSD.
I note some SSDs respond better under Level 4, and XFER 1024 or XFER 2048, or ForceBIOS - experiment ..."​

I'd appreciate others sharing their experience with SpinRite while successfully recovering SSDs.

Has anyone killed an SSD using SpinRite Level 5?

Thanks.
.