Advice to change hard drive with errors! To Clone or not?

[meganfurley]

Hi
My laptop hard drive is said to have errors and is failing. I had a test done at Dell site and was told I need to change the hard drive soon before it fails completely.
I do have problems with freezes and at least two instances of blue screen with error.

I am happy to change the hard drive but wanted to know if cloning the drive would retain the errors on the new drive. My interest in cloning is only because I have so many small software,etc installed, it would make it easier to clone.

Can you advice me as to how I should go about doing this. I also want to retain my windows 7 in my laptop (my pcs are win 10).

Regards
Megan

 

[VirtualLarry]

It's quite possible, that cloning the existing drive, if it has failing sectors, will retain those errors once cloned to a fresh new drive. The physical sectors won't be bad any more, but the data in those sectors may already be lost, and they may show as logically bad sectors in the filesystem.

 

[Ketchup]

Clone it. Run sfc on the new drive after the swap. Check your files and go from there.

 

[pitz]

My personal preference would be to use ddrescue with a map file. This way, as much of the drive can be read as possible. It might only be a very small section that has failed.

I had a drive die in a Windows XP machine, and approximately 25 megabytes out of a 200gb drive ended up being un-recoverable. When I figured out what files it corresponded to, it ended up being a few pictures which were easily recovered from backups. The rest of the data and system was completely unscathed, and the machine happily lived on (with a new HDD) for a few years longer until it was scrapped last year.

 

[Paperdoc]

Yes, clone it. I'll add even more encouraging experience, although on a desktop unit, which really makes no difference.

I had an old HDD that began to show errors in the SMART messages and CHDSK. It was not making blue screens yet, but had Bad Sectors with faulty data. I got a replacement drive and ran a cloning tool, and it showed many Bad Sectors. That is, it found corrupted data in Sectors that could not be read correctly. Each time I told it to ignore that Sector and just keep on cloning the rest. Eventually I tired of doing that and told it to ignore all un-readable Sectors and keep cloning until it finished, which it did. The new drive with its cloned data has worked flawlessly since then. I did not have any tool with which to identify which Sectors of the old drive (more importantly, which FILES from the old drive) were bad. But by luck it appears almost all my old drive's Bad Sectors actually were NOT part of any important files, because I have never encountered a corrupted file on the new drive with its cloned data.