Do BAD SECTORS get 'transferred' by Cloning?

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During the past couple of days, my WD Raptor 74GB (5 years old, but not used very often) would not boot into Win7 Ult x64, and it would do so after couple of re-tries. So I decided to clone it one last time before it really stops working, (using Acronis) and it generated 'Read Error' during the process and when I aborted the clone, it reported that it might have been due to bad sectors.

Couple of days prior to this, however, I was able to produce perfect clones of this exact same drive, with no errors.

I decided to retire this drive, and use the error free clone archive, and clone it onto a new WD Raptor 150GB drive.

I ran a check disk on this drive and Win7 x64 did not report any errors.

Question: Do cloning (ghost, imaging) software transfer bad sectors onto their new destination drives? In other words, should I be concerned about my new drives 'inheriting' the original bad sectors from the source drive?

I am using Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise (with Universal Restore) for my cloning.

Thanks in advance!

Tue, 10/05/2010 - 22:29
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truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
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Actual bad sectors won't be "moved" or "copied" to another drive. However, they can (in some cases) be marked bad. This just means that the sector was bad on the original and so it's marked bad on the new drive -- the actual physical sector isn't bad. (I don't think cloning will do this. Restoring an Entire Disk Image probably will.)

If any sectors are marked bad, you can see them in a chkdsk report. If there are sectors marked bad that shouldn't be, you can run chkdsk c: /B to have it re-evaluate them.

Tue, 10/05/2010 - 22:37