Cloned a drive with bad sectors. Now the duplicate thinks it has bad sectors too.

[Jeff7]

I used Acronis True Image to clone a laptop drive that had 4KB of bad sectors. Suddenly, the destination drive also has 4KB of bad sectors. This happened to me once before, using Norton Ghost to clone another drive - the bad sector data seems to have been copied as well. Solution then was to format the drive. That's not an option now.

And I need the false bad sector data gone - I need to use Acronis DriveDirector to do some partition work on the new drive, and it won't work if it sees bad sectors.

 

[dmcowen674]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
I used Acronis True Image to clone a laptop drive that had 4KB of bad sectors. Suddenly, the destination drive also has 4KB of bad sectors. This happened to me once before, using Norton Ghost to clone another drive - the bad sector data seems to have been copied as well. Solution then was to format the drive. That's not an option now.

And I need the false bad sector data gone - I need to use Acronis DriveDirector to do some partition work on the new drive, and it won't work if it sees bad sectors.

Info is contained in the MBR (Master Boot Record). Put a new MBR on and error will be gone.

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: dmcowen674

Originally posted by: Jeff7
I used Acronis True Image to clone a laptop drive that had 4KB of bad sectors. Suddenly, the destination drive also has 4KB of bad sectors. This happened to me once before, using Norton Ghost to clone another drive - the bad sector data seems to have been copied as well. Solution then was to format the drive. That's not an option now.

And I need the false bad sector data gone - I need to use Acronis DriveDirector to do some partition work on the new drive, and it won't work if it sees bad sectors.

Info is contained in the MBR (Master Boot Record). Put a new MBR on and error will be gone.

OMG you posted outside P&N :shocked:

 

[Calin]

It's not in MBR, as MBR is too small to contain all the bad sectors.
Try a scandisk with physical check. That should fix it.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Calin
It's not in MBR, as MBR is too small to contain all the bad sectors.
Try a scandisk with physical check. That should fix it.

Tried Chkdsk /r - it finds no new bad sectors, and merely reports that it already has 4KB of bad sectors, which is information simply cloned from the source drive. Spinrite finds no bad sectors anywhere on the drive, and the SMART data reports no reallocated sectors.


Resetting the MBR won't botch up anything else will it? I don't have any dual boot options or anything special; just a basic Windows XP installation.

 

[Smilin]

Don't reset your MBR. It's not contained in the MBR or Boot Sectors at all, each are only 512bytes in size.

Since you cloned your Drive+MFT you're stuck with it. Marking bad sectors is a one way process. You can backup/format/restore if the 4k is really worth it to you.

I wouldn't sweat it. C'mon 4k? Go find progman.exe in your system32 folder and delete that instead.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Don't reset your MBR. It's not contained in the MBR or Boot Sectors at all, each are only 512bytes in size.

Since you cloned your Drive+MFT you're stuck with it. Marking bad sectors is a one way process. You can backup/format/restore if the 4k is really worth it to you.

I wouldn't sweat it. C'mon 4k? Go find progman.exe in your system32 folder and delete that instead.

Reread the original post.

I need to use Acronis Drive Director to resize the 20GB partition to fill the 30GB drive, and it won't work with bad sectors on the drive.

 

[Smilin]

Bad clusters are stored in the 8th record of the MFT. This is not a human-editable structure and I'm not aware of any utilities that make the particular change you need. You're going to need a new MFT.

Format.

Try ntbackup instead of imaging software next time You can even change your partition size without that added step.

 

[Jeff7]

Seems like a bit of a bug somewhere then - I believe that this "bad sector" is actually a 3rd generation thing.
Back when I got this laptop, it had a 10GB drive that developed a bad sector. It was cloned to a 20GB drive with Norton Ghost; the "bad sector" was copied then. Now it's been moved to a 30GB drive. Seems kind of weird that the effect is cumulative like this.

 

[Smilin]

Yeah, it's a bug alright but it sounds like both Ghost and True Image have it.

That data is hardware specific and shouldn't be moved as part of the image. Same thing with MAC address (sometimes), pagefile and some other stuff. It's just a shortcoming of your imaging software. Backup software doesn't have this problem but in many cases isn't as fast as just throwing down an image.


edit: This obviously worked once when you put down the image. Can't you just put it down again and resize at that time instead of after the fact?

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Yeah, it's a bug alright but it sounds like both Ghost and True Image have it.

That data is hardware specific and shouldn't be moved as part of the image. Same thing with MAC address (sometimes), pagefile and some other stuff. It's just a shortcoming of your imaging software. Backup software doesn't have this problem but in many cases isn't as fast as just throwing down an image.


edit: This obviously worked once when you put down the image. Can't you just put it down again and resize at that time instead of after the fact?

I tried to resize it in that stage, but I couldn't find any options to do so. I'll check again though.





Edit.......uh.........mmooooookkkkkaaaay.

The Acronis Disk Director Bootable rescue media thingy said it wouldn't work with bad sectors. So, to try out the Disk Editor section of the software (it looks like it can edit parts of the MFT, or something like that), I installed Disk Director on the affected laptop. It resized the partition without complaining. :shocked::shocked::shocked:

 

[Smilin]

Cool!

I've not really used Acronis. I'm not a huge fan of imaging software and typically use Ghost when I have to. Ghost lets you resize partitons as you restore them, I would assume Acronis does as well. Not sure though.

Glad you're working. Does the drive still show bad sectors?

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Smilin
Cool!

I've not really used Acronis. I'm not a huge fan of imaging software and typically use Ghost when I have to. Ghost lets you resize partitons as you restore them, I would assume Acronis does as well. Not sure though.

Glad you're working. Does the drive still show bad sectors?

Yup, it still has 4KB of bad sectors. But it is working fine; I guess I'll have to live with them there until a real solution is found. Doesn't seem like they'll do any damage at any rate.

I'll be formatting the 20GB drive sometime in the next week, and then DBANing it. That should reveal the true nature of its "bad sectors."

 

[corkyg]

Bad sectors such as you describe are mapped in IDE drives. That map can make those bad sectors invisible. Just about all IDE drives have some bad ones, but you don't see them. They are mapped out. You can fix that sort of thing most of the time using Gibson SpinRite, and it will take the time to remap the drive (non-destructively.)

SR

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: corkyg
Bad sectors such as you describe are mapped in IDE drives. That map can make those bad sectors invisible. Just about all IDE drives have some bad ones, but you don't see them. They are mapped out. You can fix that sort of thing most of the time using Gibson SpinRite, and it will take the time to remap the drive (non-destructively.)

SR

I'm aware of those. It's just that when they start showing up in the SMART readout (not the case here) or in CheckDisk, then there's a problem. And I did use Spinrite 6 on the drive. It found nothing wrong anywhere on the drive, but chkdsk still says that there are 4KB of new bad sectors.