So it seems my optimism was sorely misjudged.
The failing drive is a less than 6 month old Western Digital 1 terabyte Caviar Black. Three year warranty, solid reliability in the dozen or so in the Black line that I've used over the years. However it either had a manufacturing defect, or an accidental bump to the desk was hard enough and poorly timed enough to catch the heads not parked safely to not do damage... No way to know for sure.
This 1 terabyte drive was paritioned into two. First partition with boot data was Windows XP. Second partition without boot data (Win7 put its boot on the XP partition) is Windows 7. Both partitions were being backed up weekly by Windows 7 as incremental backups and a full disk image. *A* full disk image. Just one, inseperable. To restore one, you restore both. This would be just fine if I had a spare 1 terabyte hard drive lying around. However there are options.
I keep a suite of Linux based hard disk repair/rescue, partition editing, and cloning tools. In particular, GPartEd can not only resize partitions, it can even move their position on the hard disk. But GPartEd is picky, it wont muck with a partition that has bad blocks. In fact, if a NTFS partition has bad blocks, it can't even properly identify how much of the partition is used space. But GPartEd is just a graphical interface for a set of command-line tools. Once I learned those tools I was able to not only properly identify the used space and the minimum partition size I could shrink the Windows 7 partition to, I in fact did so. Unfortunately, the Windows XP partition is quite full and can't be shrunk below roughly 170 gigabytes. The Windows 7 partition was shrunk to 60 gigabytes. The problem here is that the largest spare hard drive I have is 149 usable gigabytes. Enough for Windows 7, but not XP.
I'd be more than happy to just leave XP out and only restore Windows 7 to the spare drive. However, as I mentioned it cannot be restored separately in Windows restore tools. And I can't just create a new backup in Windows with the smaller partitions because it still wouldn't be small enough AND Windows backup would complain and error out due to the bad blocks on the disk. But there is still another option. ConeZilla. Another Linux based tool, this one for cloning hard drives. It will take whole drives, whole images of drives, or just partitions of a drive and copy them either block by block or even cylinder by cylinder to a new drive, even at a new cylinder position on the new drive.
This is where I am at now. While typing this, CloneZilla completed cloning my Windows 7 partition to the start of the spare hard drive. I now need to hope that the clone is as complete as the original, and that a Windows 7 rescue disc can successfully build a new boot partition on the new drive. If that goes well, I'll be dropping tomorrow. If it doesn't, I may be struggling until Western Digital sends me a replacement. In the mean time I have internet access through my phone, my wife's mini-PC (which is currently the workhorse for doing all these drive operations), and even my Xbox 360 (typing this on Internet Explorer for Xbox with my computer keyboard connected to the front USB
).
Fortunately there has been no significant data loss. Almost everything that I wouldn't want to lose already gets saved to my 1.5 terabyte drive anyway, and the few things (just stuff in my User\Documents folder) left on the Windows 7 partition have been rescued. For some reason my wife's mini-PC's SATA controller doesn't mind reading my failing drive (and yes it is still failing, confirmed with S.M.A.R.T. self tests and my Linux tools). My computer throws a fit if a failing drive is plugged in.
Wish me luck. Really sad I missed Sunday practice.
