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I have an Maxtor One Touch III external drive which is a very old drive and it is not doing very well, but can still be accessed. I have a new external drive as a replacement that runs like a charm. I would like to move all data from the old over to the new.

The problem is that whenever I power on the old drive, everything is then slowed down to a halt. My windows explorer is slow/not responding, google chrome cant open web pages. Everything just stops... until I turn off the old drive. Then my computer springs to life again, explorer responds instantly, web pages load faster than ever before and everything is awesome.

How can I connect the old drive to my computer without having it slowing down my computer? I assume that windows is trying to do some discovery and/or indexing of some kind that fails/stalls. I am IT person, so any solution involving low tech stuff like command prompt etc is fine.

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This is a great issue on windows systems actually. If hard drive start failing, it freeze up the whole system even it could be a backup and external storage drive.

If it would be me, I would try to recover/cure old hard drive before moving data to another drive to be make sure all data are actual. You can explore software at http://hddguru.com that scanning hard drive and enforce HDD firmware to replace broken sectors. To be able to do it efficiently you might need to have PC that can operate in IDE mode (instead of AHCI). HDD makers trying to keep sectors replacement as last resort, when some threshold of error will triggered, HDD's firmware would "cure" bad sectors (actually replaced bad sectors with spare healthy ones). Just keep in mind, if you would be able to cure all bad sectors, do not use it, but copy content ASAP to another disk. I have a pretty good recovery experience with DOS version of Victoria from hddguru. (there might be an obstacle - it has Russian interface but it really deserve translation) Even worst numbers in SMART diagnostic might be cured if you have a patience. Well, as I said, if hard drive start failing and SMART parameters 5,196,197 is greater than 0, it will soon fail completely, but in most cases cure such drives with Victoria is more than enough to copy all data to a healthy HDD.

If you don't want to mess up with recovery, you can use any Live Linux CD, a good candidate is http://www.system-rescue-cd.org/ where you can use ddrescue utility to transfer data from bad disk.

Here is a good example how to use ddrescue :
https://www.data-medics.com/forum/how-to-clone-a-hard-drive-with-bad-sectors-using-ddrescue-t133.html

First you need to spot correct name of your external (broken hard drive). When SystemRescueCD finished to load to console, type startx to run desktop. When it finished, go to Menu->System->Show filesystems and spot your external drive by brand or label and what name operation system is assigned to it. Usually primary hard drive would be listed as /dev/sda and all other as /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc ... and so on. Write it down, your bad hard drive name and drive name that you would use as a target (where you going to copy to) then in yellow terminal windows run

ddrescue -f /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /root/log01.log

where /dev/sdb - is a bad drive and /dev/sdc is target drive where you going to copy to.

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  • Just so I understand it correctly. I can use the system-rescue-cd to copy data from one disk to the other, using what i assume to be linux console commands?
    – evilfish
    Commented Jul 21, 2018 at 21:14
  • Yes, ddrescue is utility that dedicated exactly for such cases, but I strongly advise you to try first to cure broken sectors
    – Alex
    Commented Jul 21, 2018 at 21:38
  • I will try, but if my disk locks my computer every time I turn it on I might have no other option than just go for it. I do have sort of a backup of the backup on DVD's and other media (old family videos), but it is not for all data, so it is not a complete loss and the things I will loose are less important than the data that we have else where.
    – evilfish
    Commented Jul 21, 2018 at 21:43
  • Linux handling such hardware lockdown much gently, at least it doesn't freeze primary operation system if external drive get stuck
    – Alex
    Commented Jul 21, 2018 at 21:52

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