Any way to clone a drive with bad sectors?

[The Sauce]

My friend has a failing drive that we are trying to clone and it has some damaged sectors apparently. I have tried Ghost and Drive Image 6 and both of them are stalling when they hit the damaged area. IS there any way to clone the drive and skip the damaged area that anyone knows about?

 

[tad214]

The only cloning software I know that will clone a dieing drive is Power
Quest's Drive Image, you will need to set it to ignore drive errors and
and turn off smart copy. you may find a trial version somewhere. DALE click here

 

[redbeard1]

I recently used this program to copy a partition that was badly damaged. Ghost, Drive Image, and Acronis all failed to do the job.

7tools

This thread has a description of a free program I tried called drive cloner.

Thread

Here is a link to the program if you want to try it.

Drive cloner

 

[The Sauce]

Thanks for the help. Looks like Drive Cloner in "slow mode" is doing the trick...slowly.

 

[nageov3t]

I've done it with Ghost before, but maybe it was just a fluke or something.

 

[Zepper]

If the drive is partitioned and formatted with FAT 16/32, you can use SpinRite to test and lock out the bad sectors. Then you will be able to easily copy the files off. SR will tell you which files the bad sectors are in - hopefully you'll be able to replace the bad files from install disks or they will be unimportant. SR is at GRC.com. SR v.6 will have support for NTFS and hopefully Linux drives.
. R-Studio from R-TT.com may also be useful.
.bh.

 

[deadseasquirrel]

i just used the Diagnostic Disk that came with WD hdd. Chose to format the new drive and copy from the source with bad sectors. It copied fine and then when I booted with the new HDD, it ran a scandisk automatically and fixed any errors. Works fine and was simple.

 

[Zepper]

. Good info, I'll file it away for future reference.
. But you can't be sure the files (if any) that were located on the bad sectors are not corrupt. I certainly wouldn't chance it - I hope you have a list of the affected files and the ability to replace them with known-good copies.
.bh.
:sun:

 

[Arcanedeath]

You can force Ghost to do it w/ a sector by sector copy and ignore bad blocks via comand switches

 

[The Sauce]

Well Drive Cloner ran for 8 hours and in the end it fuxor3d not only the destination drive but the original as well. I don;t know how it did it but the system would not boot at all after it finished running. Great. What a piece of crap that program is. He wound up having to reformat and reinstall windows.