
Spent three hours to-day because I thought vindows had sh*t itself completely so I thought I would load the other good HD I have installed on the computer but normally not running due to a shortage of power plugs of which there are four but because the DVD is also a Sata device it needs a sata power plug but the spare one on that power cable is too short to plug in to a HD. It is because when you install Linux it also installs the grub boot loader and even when you have not even got a Linux HD connected it still interferes with loading anything. Well I found out why you have to install vindows before installing Linux! I would manually copy, then delete myself. I would not "move" the data either for fear of failures. You might need to keep notes, or delete as you go after a successful copy. that's why I would work with smaller chunks. leaving you to either start over, or to try to sort out what you have and don't have. One big copy operation, like the entire My Documents folder, might fail with a fragile drive.

With a fragile dying drive, and if Windows and other programs will not be needed, I would manually copy just the desired data, only a little at a time, and rebuild my own copy on USB if there's room, or copy from USB to other hard drive storage if more space is needed. it is only to preserve documents and photos. A big question is, "Do you really need to save WIndows itself?" That is, "Do you want to restore this same exact old Windows at a later date?" Often this is not really the desired goal.

it really depends on what you need to preserve. Sometimes Clonezilla is not the best tool either. A true clone will erase the destination drive. do you mean a true disk-to-disk clone, or do you mean to save a disk image of the old drive to preserve it's contents? I suspect you want to make a backup image of the dying drive so that you can restore from it later.

Click to expand.Do you think the dying drive is healthy enough to sustain an intensive operation like Clonezilla? And just to be clear on your goal here.
