I have two identical 2 TB external hard drives. I regularly back up one with Seagate Toolkit and bought the second as an additional safeguard, but when I tried to copy the backup to it, the source drive suddenly became unreadable and unwritable. Copying files produces a fatal disk error, and most folders cannot be opened because of an apparent hardware failure.
Windows Disk Management still lists the drive as online with a healthy primary partition, and Seagate's diagnostic tool reports that it passes its self-test. However, the drive clearly cannot reliably read the data. Some of the files, including important backups belonging to my wife, do not exist anywhere else because they are too large to keep on my computer.
Is there a safe way to recover or clone the contents to the second drive? I am comfortable with computers but have no Linux experience. I tried creating a Clonezilla USB with Rufus, but it failed with a "/vmlinuz not found, you need to load the kernel first" error, and I have not been able to boot Rescuezilla successfully either.
3 Answers
For a drive showing read errors, a normal file copy or Clonezilla clone is not the ideal first choice. Use GNU ddrescue from a bootable recovery environment to make an image or clone while skipping unreadable areas and retrying them later. Save the image to a different disk with at least enough free space, then recover files from the image rather than repeatedly stressing the failing source drive. If the data is truly irreplaceable, stop experimenting and use a professional recovery service, since every additional power-on can make a failing disk worse.
A drive can still appear healthy in Disk Management and pass a short manufacturer test while having intermittent read failures. Those tools mostly report that the partition and basic electronics are present; they do not guarantee that every sector can be read. Treat the fatal hardware errors as serious, avoid CHKDSK and other repair utilities for now, and prioritize making a sector-level recovery image before attempting ordinary copying.
Before assuming the disk itself has failed, check the external enclosure, USB cable, and power supply. The USB-to-SATA bridge or enclosure electronics can fail while the actual disk is still readable. If the drive contains a standard SATA disk, you can carefully remove it and connect it directly to a desktop or a known-good adapter. Do not run repairs, format it, or write anything to it. Copy or image the data to another disk as soon as possible.
I tried booting Rescuezilla with Ventoy, but it only reached a GRUB command screen instead of the graphical interface. I may need to troubleshoot the boot media separately before attempting the recovery.