Yup sure. Alas you quite often don't realise that its a shagged drive until after you start... The typical situation is when doing a SSD upgrade for a user that is complaining the machine is "slow". Quite often they can't resolve "slow" into:
"its running at normal hard drive speeds, but I have got used to the responsiveness of all the other SSD machines in the office"
Vs
"Its running like the HDD is shagged and doing multiple retries to get most sectors"
Normally in these cases the clone is a quicker solution than a clean install and re-setup - but the balance soon tips if its not going to run first time.
That's the one I was referring to. I just got it muddled with dd_rescue (or dd-rescue) which, afair, was basically a driver script to dd. ddrescue is a complete utility in its own right that does what dd_rescue did and more.
Same here and I'm no programmer. However, Agent or something lost the space between Windows and NT in the registry path (for XP anyway) but then it ran fine and produced the same value as Belarc Advisor etc. ;-)
When I rebuilt my pc with a motherboard, ram and new sata disk from Novatech I installed Win 7 Pro 32 using an OEM disk, and I partitioned the disk into C, D and E drives.
I thought I had left heaps of space on C for Win 7, (applications on D, data on E) but it is now getting too full for comfort.
Win 7 cannot expand C because D and E need to be moved first. I don't think Win 7 can do this.
In theory you would hope the BIOS SMART monitor would catch those drives sooner, but in practice it seems very rare that SMART actually flags anything of use on those types of problem... So quite often IME the first indication of the problem is when you try the clone.
That's likely to be a Seagate issue rather than a failure for non- Seagate drives to provide timely warnings via their SMART monitoring.
If my experiences with HGST and Samusung drives is any guide, SMART monitoring seems to have improved somewhat in recent years. It wasn't always so but Seagate's implementation seemed to be the least useful of the lot during the first decade of SMART enabled controllers.
Whether Seagate have managed to catch up with their competitors in regard of the efficacy of SMART is a moot point afaiac since my experience of Seagate storage products over the past decade or so has only led me to believe that they are a bunch of complete idiots who have no understanding whatsoever of HDD technology (ultra hot drives, FreeAgent and GoFlex external drive storage solutions).
Checking the SMART logs on a drive that you're about to upgrade to a larger faster drive by using standard cloning tools designed to 'Work Smarter' rather than 'Harder' is always a good idea. Taking it for granted that your 2TB HDD isn't about to fail after 5 years of faultless service is a taunt to Murphy, the hands on God who likes to meddle in human affairs at times like this.
If you see any hint of impending failure, it would only be prudent to ddrescue it to the replacement drive and deal with resizing the partitions afterwards. In this case, I'd be inclined to keep the old drive somewhere safe for the next 6 months before disposing of it (or repurposing it in an experimental setup). Indeed, unless I was desperate to recycle a 2TB drive as an upgrade to an even older, lower spec system, I'd still be inclined to keep hold of it for at least another month or two to guard against the new drive being hit by an 'Infant Mortality' failure.
Could be - the last one that played that game was a 500G Barracuda...
(Having said that, I have had a few HGST simply die without much warning at all)
Keep in mind these are generally work horse office machines, with relatively little of value on the local hard drives. Email is on the server, as should be any other documentation that the user is hoping to keep. So the clone process is normally just an expedient way to do a SSD upgrade with the minimum of hassle, and avoiding having to resych 20G of email or wait for 200+ Win 7 patches to apply etc.
For a personal machine its frequently a whole different ball game.
I tend to feel that once a drive has lost "trust", there seems little point in keeping it for anything (assuming there are backups etc!)
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