I work with a school that has a Windows Vista 32-bit computer with a failing hard disk. I repaired the disk and the computer is now stable, but wish to clone the disk to a new disk to avoid future problems. I've done this kind of thing many times before with Ghost Solution Suite. On this disk, the clone begins and first does the $Log file, then the current file display stays forever on "19 Unnamed MFT entry". The clone proceeds to 100%, then exceeds 100% and keeps on going. The time and bytes remaining become negative values. The size of the clone exceeds the original disk size and will keep going until it fills the destination disk (no matter how large), then it will fail with a disk full error. I also tried "partition to image" rather than "disk to disk", same result.
If I check the destination disk after cloning fails, it appears to have the file/directory structure but NTFS is heavily damaged.
I'm guessing there is a bad entry in the MFT of the source disk, even though the computer boots and runs normally. I've run chksk /f and /r many times, the disk now passes with no reported problems (although at first it had many). I've run "contig c:\$Mft" and also used the $MFT optimization features in UltraDefrag. No change.
Currently the source disk shows no problems except SMART unhealthy status, due to the numerous errors before repair. I've tried using the Ghost agent in both VSS and PreOS modes. Also tried the Ghost Boot CD locally on the machine. Result is the same in all cases. Never seen this behavior before, usually Ghost runs without problems. This disk has proprietary vendor software & settings so we'd like to avoid re-installing WIndows if possible (expensive vendor service call required).
Any suggestions for how to overcome this? Could it be a partiiton table issue rather than MFT?