Cloning a hard drive with pending sectors

[RyomaFV]

I'd like to ask if it is advisable to clone my Samsumg F3 hard drive, which currently have 3 pending sectors, to a new WDD HD, or just perform a clean install on the new one. I'm just asking to save time, since clean install takes a long of time to set things up. Both drives have 1TB capacity. I'd be using Acronis true image to perform this. I've also used HDDregenerator to hide the pending sectors and keep the drive functional, since it was having some occassional hiccups.

Thank you!

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, RyomaFV.

As bad sectors are basically physical damage on the surface of the HDD's platters, you should be OK with cloning the drive. It can't affect the physical health of your new HDD. However, If there's data that's been corrupted due to those bad sectors it will still be corrupted after you've cloned the drive.

I know that setting up a rig is a really really tedious process sometimes, especially if there are a lot of programs and apps for you to configure afterwards, but fresh install is always recommended. On the other hand if you really need to save up some time, you could try cloning the drive and see how your system behaves afterwards. It would also be advisable to run chkdsk in case there are partition/file system issues.

Whatever you decide to do, I'd strongly recommend that you backup all of your important data, which you might have on that drive, before you start the cloning process, just to be on the safe side.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD

 

[RyomaFV]

Thank you! The pendings sectors luckly aren't that high yet, so I'll probably keep the drive as a spare backup for non crucial data. I'm just afraid of losing my access to windows due to one of those sectors having a crucial file. I think they are in the system partition, so it could happen anytime. I've been using hddregenerator a lot to keep the sectors at bay, but I know it doesn't save data, so I probably lost a few files in there. According to HDTune test, the disk has around 2.5% bad sectors.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

I see, hopefully the clone is successful and everything is fine afterwords, but as I've already mentioned - backing up your data before that is crucial. After you are done with backing up and cloning the drive, once you've determined that the clone works fine, you could low level format the drive with the bad sectors. You can either use an HDD diagnostic tool (most of them have that option), or do that via CMD and DISKPART. After that you should initialize, partition and format as you see fit and re-test it to see what's the situation with the bad sectors.

Here's how to low level format (a.k.a. Write Zeros) it via DISKPART. Open CMD (as adinistrator) and:
1. Type diskpart and press "enter"
2. Type list disk and press "enter"
3. Type select disk X and press "enter", where X is the number of the drive you wish to select. Make sure that you've selected the correct one. You should be able to recognize it by its storage capacity.
4. Type clean all and press "enter". When the process is finished, you can just close the Windows.

This will write a "zero" and piratically make each individual sector blank, but it could take a lot of time, depending on the drive's size. I know I'm a bit like a broken record, but this is important and I'll say it again - backup, there's no data recover after a low level format.