Can't boot to SystemRescueCD liveUSB

Question

I'm trying to boot my computer to a live USB. My goal is to clone my hard drive onto a new one. I'm trying to use SystemRescueCD so I can clone with ddrescue. I followed the instructions on that page to load the ISO onto a USB stick. I've successfully loaded Ubuntu off this same USB stick in the past.

The issue is my computer won't boot. I get grub to come up, and select the default option, but then it freezes quickly during the boot process.

Here's what my screen looks like when it freezes:

You can see it freezes after less than 1.5 seconds. It's been sitting like this for over an hour. What can I do?

Answer 1

In my experience, it's unusual for SystemRescueCD to freeze. As you want to clone your harddrive, that suggests that something is already wrong with your computer, and there may be other things wrong with your computer (e.g. bad RAM) which cause the freeze.

Another way to clone the harddrive is to take the harddrive out of the computer, connect it to a different PC (directly or via a SATA-USB adapter), and then clone it. If the data is important, that's the first thing I'd do instead of risking more damage by keeping it in a possibly faulty system