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Failing hard drive won't boot to Windows - best way to clone to a new drive?

I have a Lenovo T440s that will not boot to Windows. Various hardware tests indicate that the hard drive is failing.

Lenovo diagnostics shows that:
Smart status: FAILED
Smart short self-test: FAILED
Targeted read test: FAILED

What is the best way to clone this drive to a new SSD if I can't get into Windows to run a program such as AOMEI backupper? Should I connect both failing and new drive to another computer and clone from there, boot to USB and clone to the new drive via USB enclosure, or ??

John

You can try Symantec (or Veritas) Ghost which can back up a drive and restore it to another drive) .

But if the drive has enough errors that it will not boot, I question whether copying such a corrupt drive to a new drive is a good idea.

Put the drive in a carrier, and get what data you can. Then install Windows fresh on a new drive

nobus

what drive model is it? run the manufacturer's diagnostic - eg intel SSD toolkit
i use the UBCD for this, see below - for rotating drives
it may be necessary to turn off smart reporting

arnold

Depending on which SSD you buy' they often have/include tools that you can use to clone the drive.
Visit the manufacturer site of either your HD or the SSd and see if they offer cloning software.

Check the system settings to see whether you can disable the smart check, or the stop on all errors for the purpose of booting the system to facilitate the cloning of a live, the issue/difficulty when a drive is failing is that installing the cloning software if not present adds risks ......

creating and image backup ..

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Ryan Herndon

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Ryan Herndon

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I was able to solve the issue based on my own research and software solution.