Quote Originally Posted by saikee View Post
Your cloning with dd has failed in both cases.

Your source is 13Gb large and the target is 41.1Gb so a standard cloning will stop once the source is exhausted in reading.

However dd reported only

6190552+0 records in
6190552+0 records out

were processed. As the block was not specified so the default of 1 record= 512 byte would be used. 512 bytes times 6190552 is 3.17Gb. Therefore only part of the source was successfully cloned and the rest was missing.

Although the partition table is identical in both disks that is only because it came out from the first 512 bytes of sda and sdb.

My guess is you are using only partly cloned disk with the remaining 13-3.17=9.83Gb same as before. Thus that explains the funny behaviour of the Xp.
That never occurred to me, and it certainly make sense.
[snip]
Your sda hard disk has deteriorated to the extent that dd cannot read the entire disk in each attempt.
Although I still don't see any evidence that the source disk is going downhill (because Windows still runs Ok), I will take your word for it and have reinstalled Windows on a different HDD.

Thank you so much for taking the time to help me get a better grasp on what was going on. I still don't completely understand it and may someday tinker with dd again in order to gain a better understanding.