Jsmply
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Cloning a hard drive with bad sectors
Hi Experts,
We have a desktop that Norton Ghost says has bad sectors. Sadly, this was not discovered until attempting to clone the drive. With "ignore bad sectors" checked, Ghost can image the drive. The question is - is that safe to do it that way and deploy that image on a new (good) HDD or is it introducing problems?
The current drive and OS installation seem to run fine, the reason for working on the machine was not failures currently attributed to the hard drive. Just noticed it when backing it up prior to performing some software updates.
No images were taken of this machine prior to now, so otherwise the only option is backup the data and perform a fresh OS install on a new drive.
Thanks
We have a desktop that Norton Ghost says has bad sectors. Sadly, this was not discovered until attempting to clone the drive. With "ignore bad sectors" checked, Ghost can image the drive. The question is - is that safe to do it that way and deploy that image on a new (good) HDD or is it introducing problems?
The current drive and OS installation seem to run fine, the reason for working on the machine was not failures currently attributed to the hard drive. Just noticed it when backing it up prior to performing some software updates.
No images were taken of this machine prior to now, so otherwise the only option is backup the data and perform a fresh OS install on a new drive.
Thanks
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Dave Alford
garycase - when Spinrite locates a damaged area it will tell you in the results what file (if any) was using that particular sector - http://www.grc.com/image/srDTL.gif
Thanks Dave ... somehow I'd missed that.
garycase - yea, and you're right about running SPINRITE on suspect drive (especially in any recovery mode). I learnt the hardway and ran in before cloneing the damaged disk! You should clone what you can and then run something like Spinrite to identify bad sectors and then possibly try a repair !
ASKER
noxcho - Quick question - After running chkdsk /r, should you be able to complete an image without telling the imaging software to ignore bad sectors?
As I mentioned in my earlier post, provided the HD itself is good, then yes.
ASKER
You are right, sorry about that. Will attempt now and post back.
noxcho - Quick question - After running chkdsk /r, should you be able to complete an image without telling the imaging software to ignore bad sectors?When CHKDSK marks the bad sectors as bad and stop trying to write and read to this sectors then the file system can tell to imaging software that these sectors are abandoned.
In other words when creating data bitmap snapshot using VSS these sectors will be ignored.
But I know cases when MS CHKDSK and HDD vendor made tools found different amount of bad sectors and those found by CHKDSK were less.
ASKER
So the imaging would have to be done within Windows instead of imaging from a boot disk?
No difference. The info about bad sectors is saved in file system, not in Windows.
ASKER
Thx. Thought so but sense you mentioned VSS was not sure.
ASKER
Thx all