Also if your hard drive is clicking, making other strange noise, showing the wrong capacity, or not appearing in BIOS you should immediately power it down and seek professional advice. Please Note: if your data is critical to your life and/or business it is always best to seek out professional data recovery services rather than attempt this yourself. However, for the sake of this tutorial, we'll assume that you don't have access to such hardware and need to do this using software only. The best way to clone is using specialized hardware such as DeepSpar Disk Imager, Data Extractor (in PC-3000), Atola, etc. In data recovery, it is best practice to always clone first because in many cases there are bad sector areas of supposed 'healthy' hard drives that can cause them to fail during the process. Attempting to scan and recover data from such a drive directly without cloning first is very likely to result in the drive completely failing. Introduction: When a hard drive is known, or assumed, to have bad sectors the first thing that you should ever do before attempting data recovery is getting a good clone of the good sectors which you can work from. This is a subject that comes up often on the various forums, so I figure I'll just create a tutorial about it and when the subject arises we can just point people here.
