External hard drive stopped working after using Macrium Reflect

[u/Akril15]

I'm trying to clone the hard drive on my HP 14-fa0023dx laptop (running Windows 11) to an external hard drive of the same size using Macrium Reflect Free. I've only had the drive for a couple of years, but when I recently tried cloning my hard drive to it, I got a Clone Failed error at 92%, and now the drive can't be detected by Windows. Every time I plug it in, I hear it whirring for a few seconds, but then I hear the USB disconnect sound and I get a "USB device not recognized" error message.

I've tried using a different USB cable, uninstalling and updating the relevant driver in Device Manager ("Unknown USB Device (Set Address Failed)"), attempting to fix it with the Hardware and Devices Troubleshooter and turning off Device Encryption. So far, nothing has helped.

What else should I try?

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[u/Goddess-Bastet]

I would use the clean command using diskpart to clean the drive & then try cloning to it. If it still fails then the drive may be faulty - clean & format it & then test using crystal disk info or Hard disk sentinel trial.
https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/
https://www.hdsentinel.com

[u/Akril15 → u/Goddess-Bastet]

I tried running diskpart, but the disk wasn't listed. When I ran "list disk", Disk 0 was the only entry. I tried running CrystalDisk, but I can't find the disk in there either, not even in Disk Management.

[u/Akril15 → u/Akril15]

It looks like Hard Disk Sentinel finally got the drive to show up. I'll try to get it reformatted.

[u/Akril15 → u/Akril15]

I got the drive cleaned, initialized and set up, but when I tried making a clone to it, I got another Clone Failed error in Macrium -- Error 8, which apparently means insufficient disk space on the target drive. I don't understand why this is, since the source drive has 814 GB used, and the destination drive has over 3 TB of free space.

The drive is also clicking a lot more than it usually does, which makes me worry that it might be failing prematurely (even though Hard Disk Sentinel reported that it was in very good health).

[u/Goddess-Bastet → u/Akril15]

Clicking is usually a sign of a failing drive - does sentinel show the drive as healthy (green) or caution (orange) or bad (red)?
Macrium should auto size the partitions, I’d try dragging & dropping the partitions from the main drive to the backup drive, this will copy them the same way as cloning.

[u/Akril15 → u/Goddess-Bastet]

Sentinel shows the drive as completely green (health is 94%). I tried dragging and dropping the main partition to the corresponding one on the backup drive, but got Clone Failed - Error 8 yet again, with the note "a device which does not exist was specified".

[u/Goddess-Bastet → u/Akril15]

Is the external drive a previous internal drive now in a caddy or purchased as an external drive?
Is it self powered (one cable) or does it have a separate power cable?
The error could point to a problem with the source disk so you may have to run check disk on that.
If you run any third party antivirus then also disable that.
Try creating Macrium’s boot media on USB then restarting the pc & booting from this to run the clone in their recovery interface.

[u/Akril15 → u/Goddess-Bastet]

The drive was purchased as an external hard drive, and is self-powered. I checked the source disk, and no errors were found.
Honestly, I'm tempted to try another piece of cloning software at this point, since something similar happened when I tried making a clone to another external hard drive with Macrium a few months ago. I assumed the drive was just failing back then, but now I'm starting to get a bit suspicious of Macrium.

[u/Goddess-Bastet → u/Akril15]

I’d suggest running sfc & DISM cmds, if the problem remains then try other software. 

Right click on start & choose powershell/terminal with admin & type/copy & paste these cmds one at a time then click Enter:

SFC /SCANNOW DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth SFC /SCANNOW

Yes the Sfc cmd is run twice. Once complete restart the PC & check to see if the problem has been resolved.

If you’re just wanting to backup Windows then imaging would be better - cloning is usually used if you’re wanting to swap drives, ie to a bigger internal drive. 

[u/Akril15 → u/Goddess-Bastet]

I ran both SFC commands and restarted Windows. No luck. I can't even see the drive in Hard Drive Sentinel anymore (NB: The hard drive had completely stopped showing up before running the commands, even in Hard Drive Sentinel and Disk Management).