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how to clone a system SSD with ECC failure to another new SSD ?

A

amiens80

Joined
Mar 29, 2023
Messages
59 (0.08/day)
hi,

i have a samsung 2TB ssd 870 EVO concerned by the ECC failure.
i bought a brand new 4TB 870 QVO to replace it.
I tried to clone my system SSD with Samsung Migration Tool, but it failed !
I tred with Clonezilla, but it failled too !
i tried with an old acronis software , it failed too.

I don't have time to reinstalled the OST and software, i just want to clone my old one.

Is there a software who can clone it , even with ECC problem ? It is kind of funny because my OS starts and runs fine !

I also keep my previous SSD 850 Evo, and i'm considering to clone my 870 Evo to that old 850 one ! i'm starting to free 1TB to make it enought ! but i don't know either it the cloning will work or not...
I'm stuck, because if i send my 870 EVO to samsung RMA, i need a replacement of my OS !

What should i do, or what could i do ?
 
Best Answer:

Time to reinstall your OS and software on new 4TB QVO is probably the only solution. The only viable solution that doesn't blow up in your face taking even more time and effort.
 
i read on another site, a people who cloned his 870evo to an HDD before send it to RMA. that is what i would like to perform with success to keep my OS running. I starting to backup all data (not system data) from SSD to elswhere now. I just need a software to clone the SSD with OS.
i bought the SSD on september 2021 on amazon. I guess i have a 3y waranty to get a new one (with no problem) and 5years at samsung waranty too.
I don't know samsung/amazon rma process, but i guess there are not perfect like Western Digital who send first the new drive before you send them back the failed one....
So i need to clone it !
Reinstall is a lot of time, it is not just windows. i don't play game, it is a workstation (cgi,vfx, gfx...).
I know i should have RAID it...
 
Even if you succeed, you would probably copy errors over.
 
amiens80 said:
i read on another site, a people who cloned his 870evo to an HDD before send it to RMA. that is what i would like to perform with success to keep my OS running. I starting to backup all data (not system data) from SSD to elswhere now. I just need a software to clone the SSD with OS.
i bought the SSD on september 2021 on amazon. I guess i have a 3y waranty to get a new one (with no problem) and 5years at samsung waranty too.
I don't know samsung/amazon rma process, but i guess there are not perfect like Western Digital who send first the new drive before you send them back the failed one....
So i need to clone it !
Reinstall is a lot of time, it is not just windows. i don't play game, it is a workstation (cgi,vfx, gfx...).
I know i should have RAID it...
Click to expand...
Did you mean "I know I should have had a backup"? RAID is NEVER a backup.
 
timta2 said:
Did you mean "I know I should have had a backup"? RAID is NEVER a backup.
Click to expand...
Not backup but if one drive failed in a redundant setup you might still be running enough to replace a drive or image the volume. However in the OP's scenario where the drive sounds like it will corrupt data you won't be saved by raid if the drive doesn't fail in a way to be dropped from the array.

amiens80 said:
hi,

i have a samsung 2TB ssd 870 EVO concerned by the ECC failure.
i bought a brand new 4TB 870 QVO to replace it.
I tried to clone my system SSD with Samsung Migration Tool, but it failed !
I tred with Clonezilla, but it failled too !
i tried with an old acronis software , it failed too.

I don't have time to reinstalled the OST and software, i just want to clone my old one.

Is there a software who can clone it , even with ECC problem ? It is kind of funny because my OS starts and runs fine !

I also keep my previous SSD 850 Evo, and i'm considering to clone my 870 Evo to that old 850 one ! i'm starting to free 1TB to make it enought ! but i don't know either it the cloning will work or not...
I'm stuck, because if i send my 870 EVO to samsung RMA, i need a replacement of my OS !

What should i do, or what could i do ?
Click to expand...
I had a similar problem not being able to clone an older drive (not a Samsung drive) that was actually reporting failures but was able to backup data thankfully uncorrupted.
You may have little choice but to reinstall.

In the mean time could you put your data on a good drive and continue to run your OS on the bad drive?
Can you temporarialy swap your old OS drive to prep a new OS drive and prepare it incrementally over several days, then when done preparing the new OS drive swap it over permanently?
 
Last edited:
In the mean time could you put your data on a good drive and continue to run your OS on the bad drive?
Can you temporarialy swap your old OS drive to prep a new OS drive and prepare it incrementally over several days, then when done preparing the new OS drive swap it over permanently?
Click to expand...

i had this other option in head : install & add another OS (like another windows) to the brand new connected SSD (still sata) and have multiboot but i have a licence problem and compatibility software issue.
Now, i'm "lucky" because i saw no bug on OS & software . i only discover he problem during the clone and th ebakcup of old "cold data" (which should have been on DD, i know). Once i will remove all cold-data (no os & no software), i will redo a attempt to clone, maybe the corrupt ECC are not on the "remaining" files of the OS/sofware.... fingers cross......
 
amiens80 said:
i had this other option in head : install & add another OS (like another windows) to the brand new connected SSD (still sata) and have multiboot but i have a licence problem and compatibility software issue.
Now, i'm "lucky" because i saw no bug on OS & software . i only discover he problem during the clone and th ebakcup of old "cold data" (which should have been on DD, i know). Once i will remove all cold-data (no os & no software), i will redo a attempt to clone, maybe the corrupt ECC are not on the "remaining" files of the OS/sofware.... fingers cross......
Click to expand...
I don't know. Sounds like SSD hardware failure and multi-boot could be wasting your time compared to just swapping drives around and prepping a new OS when you have time.
I recall Acronis had an option when cloning to ignore errors, have you tried that? (not that I would recommend ignoring errors normally)
 
amiens80 said:
Now, i'm "lucky" because i saw no bug on OS & software . i only discover he problem during the clone and th ebakcup of old "cold data" (which should have been on DD, i know). Once i will remove all cold-data (no os & no software), i will redo a attempt to clone, maybe the corrupt ECC are not on the "remaining" files of the OS/sofware.... fingers cross......
Click to expand...

Experience says you should commit to decisive action. Devoting efforts towards saving the bootable system or the potentially monumental task of reconstructing it with fresh installs.

You might get lucky and have non-essential data corrupted. Please take time to make a few backups whichever route proves successful.

nomdeplume said:
Best Answer:

Time to reinstall your OS and software on new 4TB QVO is probably the only solution. The only viable solution that doesn't blow up in your face taking even more time and effort.
Click to expand...

"Best Answer:" was uncalled for hubris.

TPU has a number of long serving members with endless patience who have collectively taken a breather from 24 hour help desk duties. This reply depreciated their contributions.
 
Can you somehow perform file-based instead of sector-based cloning? That way, the software might be able to inform you exactly which file has an error - or many of them.
One of the issues with what you're trying to achieve now is that, even if you succeed, the copy won't be able to tell you which file is corrupted.
 
Wirko said:
Can you somehow perform file-based instead of sector-based cloning? That way, the software might be able to inform you exactly which file has an error - or many of them.
One of the issues with what you're trying to achieve now is that, even if you succeed, the copy won't be able to tell you which file is corrupted.
Click to expand...
samsung magicien does not have a tool to tell you which file is corrupt. As i know, these files are not on my daily use of my computer. Imagine it is a very old file i will never read, even not backup, so i can't find it !
 
If you are comfortable with it I would boot a Linux or FreeBSD boot stick and use one of the tools to copy raw devices that know how to skip bad blocks (and replace them with zeros). It won't tell you which file is corrupt either, but it will copy everything that is not affected to the correct place, before and after the error(s).
 
I like the idea of booting into a non-Windows OS and running professional RAW disk copying tools, but I suspect the process might take longer than reinstalling Windows on a good SSD. A lot depends on how many "retries" are performed each time the copying sofware encounters a bad block on the SSD, before continuing on to the next block. If the SSD is badly corrupted, it could take many hours (or days) to finish the RAW clone. Professional disk recovery services can extract surprising amounts of data from sick drives, but at consierable cost. In this instance, it sounds like most of the data is recoverable and the SSD still boots into Windows, but but ECC errors mean the drive could fail completely at any time.

On older systems dating back to 2013, it only takes me half an hour to install a fresh copy of Windows on a new (slow) SATA SSD. On a modern system with a fast gen4 NVMe it takes roughly 15 minutes to install Windows. Provided you have a legitimate copy of Windows, the OS should Activate the first time you connect to the Internet. From this point it usually takes me two to three hours to install all my favourite programs and tweak Windows the way I like it. Total time to completion is less than half a (working) day. You could spend much longer trying to clone a failed drive containing ECC errors, with no guarantee of success.
 
Yeah, but you learn more by continuing to do recovery attempts :)

I guess it also comes down to whether that is fun for you or not. I practically never (re-)install OSes. The last one I did is when I got a Apple Silicon M1 mini which I couldn't restore a Intel Mac backup to.
 
a friend suggest me another solution : make a VM of the physical OS and test it on a another computer. if the VM work fine, at lest i will have a backup OS in case of crash worst scenario.
I finaly remove all the cold data , now the os & software & bdd only take less than 256GB (of the 2TB SSD). I will do another attempt to clone this week-end.
 
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