Cloning an HDD with bad sectors?

[thevan]

Hey y'all,

Another hard drive problem here... my 3 year old laptop drive (a WD Scorpio Black) has heaps of bad sectors, so many so that CrystalDisk gives me a warning, while WD Diagnostics literally tells me that there are "too many bad sectors."

Attempting to access files I assume to lie in these sectors (say, in my music folder, or when trying to update Windows) causes the drive to stall (solid instead of blinking HDD light).

Now, I do have a new HDD in hand, and I would like to clone the old one on to this one, but will the bad sectors cause me problems? What program should I be using to do this, and will it be able to recover these seemingly unreadable files?

 

[Arkaign]

I think you will find good info in this thread :

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2295490

Personally, I prefer to just copy over the good stuff first when the drive begins to go batty, and reload OS+Apps on a fresh drive to be sure everything is flawless, but it sounds like you already have data inaccessible. You will need some kind of error-skipping data recovery like ddrescue, and depending on what's recoverable, you may still need to freshly load a replacement drive to get back to operation (if portions of windows are destroyed beyond recovery).

 

[MontoyaP]

Try to use this software: http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/HDD-Bad-Sectors-Repair.shtml

The bad sectors are moved into a single location of the hard drive and you should still use it. However, I am not very sure if will be able to work with it on long run. I suggest you to change it with another hard drive.

 

[tweakboy]

You can fix the bad sectors with a program called

HDD Regenerator


it will fix all your bad sectors, but you need full version of it. Fix those sectors then do what you gotta do.

 

[thevan]

Thanks guys, I will give these programs a shot and report back!

 

[thevan]

Ended up using DD off a live ubuntu cd with the conv=sync,noerror remark. Worked like a charm! (I was astounded when Windows booted without any other hassle)