[SOLVED] Cloning dying HDD question

[jimifilth]

So my HDD is dying violently. One day, I got SMART error on my drive, the next day it told me something was wrong, that chkdsk could fix. After that all went to hell and I lost my file systems and so on.

After all of this I ran another program, which told me I have a hellalot of bad sectors, so I decided to clone my hdd to another one before doing anything else.

Now to the question:
HDD Raw Copy Tool told me the full cloning succeeded, and I got some of my files saved with EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, however, a VERY big portion of the files seems to be corrupted, most likely due to the many bad sectors. Did the cloning software also clone the bad sectors? Can I possibly fix them on my NEW drive, if they were succesfully cloned, if they happened to be logical bad sectors, and not physical?

 

[USAFRet]

Bad data is bad data.
Cloning a failing drive can just move the bad data from the old to the new.

A corrupt Word doc or game file that is now on the new drive is just as corrupt. And can't be 'fixed', because there is nothing to look back and say "This is what it used to be".

 

[USAFRet]

This is what backups are for...having a known good copy of the data before the drive is failing.

 

[jimifilth]

Yeah.. I know.

A while ago I downloaded all my photos from Google Photos cloud backup, to migrate to a new Gmail acoount, and this happened, during the time it took for me to upload them back to my new account. That is what I get for using an old spare laptop hard drive. I try to keep my stuff backed up, but for once I thought that: "meh, how could it POSSIBLY die within a month or so." so I downloaded my Photos and removed my account.

But yeah, to be clear, there is no way to recover anything from my new drive except for what I already have? The only way to get anything back is to send the original to a specialist and pay millions? Because I will.

 

[USAFRet]

If the original contents of a file were:
123456789

And now it is:
12$4#6*&9

You have nothing to tell it what the contents used to be.
Especially with an image file.
A text doc, you can probably suss out the contents and meaning.
An image file may be completely unreadable in an image application.

And now on a cloned drive? Not a chance, even if you pay $$$.

 

[fzabkar]

HDDSuperClone and ddrescue both understand how to clone a drive that has bad sectors. Both tools allow the user to specify a fill pattern for any sector which cannot be read. That is, any bad sector (ie one that is unreadable), will have its unreadable data replaced with "BAD_BAD_BAD_..." (or whatever pattern the user chooses) on the destination drive.

I suspect that most, if not all, of the file corruption may be due to running CHKDSK in "repair" mode. Is that what happened?