Repair tools stress a disk - scans, checks and fixes all make a sick drive work hard. When a drive is failing, the order of operations is everything: clone it first, while it can still read, and do your repairs on the copy. A live cloning tool booted from Ventoy makes that possible even when Windows will not start.
The classic beginner's mistake is running repair after repair on a dying disk until it gives up completely - taking the data with it. Professionals reverse the order: image first, repair later. Booting Clonezilla or Rescuezilla from your Ventoy USB copies the entire disk, sector by sector, to a healthy drive, including Windows, programs and files in one pass. After that, the original can fail whenever it likes; the data is already safe.
The warning signs are consistent: Windows freezes for seconds at a time, file copies crawl or fail, the PC takes longer to boot every week, or disk health tools report caution or bad status with reallocated or pending sectors. Mechanical drives often add sound - clicking, buzzing or repeated spin-up attempts.
Any one of these moves the disk to the top of the queue. It is not a "fix Windows first" situation any more; it is a "save the contents" situation.
Disk-checking tools are thorough, and thorough means the failing drive must read every sector, sometimes for hours. A drive near the end can die during exactly that workout - with the data still only on it.
A clone reads the disk once, in one steady pass, and writes everything to safety. Repairs, experiments and Windows fixes then happen on the new disk, where a mistake costs nothing. If the data is truly priceless - a business's only records, a family's only photos - and the drive is clicking or barely detected, skip even the clone and go straight to a professional recovery lab. Every extra power-on reduces what a lab can save.
A clone that starts failing on every second sector is telling you the source is leaving. Pushing through can finish the disk off. Stop the run, power the old disk down, and decide with a clear head: is the remaining data worth a professional recovery lab's fee? For business-critical or irreplaceable data, the answer is usually yes - and the lab's chances are best when the disk arrives with the fewest possible power-on hours behind it.
If the clone completed with only a few skipped areas, you have won almost everything - the gaps usually land in free space or in one or two unlucky files.
Watch the video for the complete rescue toolkit walkthrough - including the backup and cloning tools carried on the Ventoy drive.
▶️ Watch Full VideoCopying files takes the documents you can see. Cloning takes the entire disk - Windows, programs, settings and files - so the new disk can simply replace the old one and boot. If the disk still reads well and only data matters, file copying with live Linux is faster.
For a straight disk-to-disk clone, the destination must be at least as large as the source. Some tools can shrink partitions to fit a smaller target when the actual data is small, but treat that as an advanced route - equal or larger is the reliable rule.
Yes, with one difference: SSDs rarely click or warn audibly, and a worn-out SSD can switch to read-only or vanish suddenly. The clone-first rule matters even more, and the window to act can be shorter.