Should I clone a Bad Hard Drive

[StreetHacker]

Now I always thought if the hard drive is bad and i try to clone it that it most likely will not go through or if it does it will have issues..Is there a tool that will clone a bad hard drive to a new hard drive without any issues.. Oram i right that if the hard drive is bad and u have not made a image of the hard drive you will need to do a complete restore to get the computer up and running. Thanks!

 

[rurbaniak]

Now I always thought if the hard drive is bad and i try to clone it that it most likely will not go through or if it does it will have issues..Is there a tool that will clone a bad hard drive to a new hard drive without any issues.. Oram i right that if the hard drive is bad and u have not made a image of the hard drive you will need to do a complete restore to get the computer up and running. Thanks!

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Cloning could kill the drive though. I'd suggest grabbing any important files first before trying it. I'll clone when I can, reload if it's a better option.

 

[kagman]

I agree. Just grab the important files first... Forget about making an image of the bad hard drive.

People will never learn to backup..lol

 

[NYJimbo]

I cant imagine how cloning can kill a drive any more than grabbing files off it.

As a matter of fact if a drive comes in and its booting weird like its having trouble seeking while loading windows, the first thing I will do is try to do a clone.

Maybe we are mixing terms? "Cloning" and "ghosting/imaging" can be two very different processes.

A "ghosting" as many see it is when you image a drive while its live on the machine to a secondary drive, like a backup. A "cloning" is when we remove the drive and slave it to another machine and then using a special boot disk like "Acronis Migrate Easy" we tell that software to do a pure disk to disk copy, even sector by sector if its having trouble. This will bypass any "rules" the O/S has for working with the data or any timeouts written into the O/S when doing a seek or file open.

On a cloning I never install anything on the "bad" drive and then try to copy from it under its own O/S.

I have found that many times when a drive is bootable but will not load Windows properly if I clone it to a new drive it will boot, but may be missing some system files that I can reload and make the O/S whole again.

 

[kisk]

Guess it depends if you mean "bad" as in bad data or if you mean "bad" as in a failing hard drive. If the latter, then I like to throw it in the freezer for about an hour to get it nice and cool then pull the essential data, then try to for the image.

... If you did mean "bad" as in bad data/non-boot then image.

 

[MobileTechie]

I'm with NYJ - when you have a suspected bad drive then that points towards cloning it first and everything else second.

It's just as likely to break whilst you're poking around trying to find important files as when cloning it.

There are a ton of apps that will clone a drive. However for problematic drives you might need something that will not stop on errors or even reverse clone it. My favorite is ddrescue.

 

[iptech]

I will always try and clone a failing hard drive if I need to recover files. Sector cloning places far less stress on the drive mechanics than using a file explorer, most cloning software will allow you to ignore bad sectors giving you the best option for recovering readable file fragments. In my experience damage to hard disk platter usually occurs on the first part of the drive, i.e. where the operating system files are kept. The users' data files are usually not affected.

Of course if the drive controller or read/write heads are damaged then cloning will not be an option.

 

[xxenon]

I use Drive Snapshot to save an image of the drive to my own hd.
I find it's faster than TrueImage and lets you work with the image before writing it to a new drive. If the new drive won't boot, I'll try chkdsk and sfc from erd to repair errors.
If this fails, it's time for a fresh install of the os, then replace data from saved image.

 

[kisk]

I use Drive Snapshot to save an image of the drive to my own hd.

Just checked this out... nice little app.

 

[Galdorf]

I reverse clone a bad drive i have done 110 or more so far no problems some with only a few bad sectors i was able to clone drive to a new one and customer had no problems bad sectors were where the temp internet files were so no loss there.