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Clone HDD that has bad sectors to a smaller SSD

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How to clone a HDD of 320Gb that has bad sectors to a smaller (240Gb) SSD drive? Sector-by-sector cloning isn;t possible because the SSD is smaller than the HDD. I ran CHKDSK /F /R /B but to no avail. I even tried sector-by-sector cloning to a temporary 1TB HDD and than clong that one to SSD, but it seems to hve inhereted the original fault status of the original HDD.

I read something about resetting NTFS bad sectors statusses by GPARTED or SpinRite, but I'm a bit reluctant to try them because I have no experience in it. Purchasing licenses for alternative programs is no issue, as long as it works.

How do I get this 320Gb HDD to clone to a 240GB SSD?

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Abbe, welcome to these public User Forums.

Cloning and bad sectors do not mix well together and are unlikely to be successful unless the target drive is the same size or larger.

The best recommendation I can offer is to make a full disk & partitions backup of your failing HDD drive to create a backup image on a separate external drive.

Once you have the backup image, then check the log for the backup task to see whether sector-by-sector was used, and if so, for which partitions on the HDD source drive?

Use the MVP Log Viewer tool (link below) to check the backup log data.

Once you have a clearer picture of how the backup image was created, then it may be possible to restore your backup image to the new 240 GB SSD drive by using manual partition sizing.

The key issue here is if sector-by-sector mode is used for your main OS partition on this HDD, as this effectively will be a direct 1:1 sector copy, so you would need the same size of drive for the target SSD to host that OS partition.

One other thing that you can try doing here, is to try to reduce the size of the main partition on the HDD by either using Windows Disk Management to try to Shrink the partition, or else using a Partition Manager application such as the free MiniTool Partition Wizard.. BUT.. please make a full disk backup first before attempting this!

Abbe,

You might find the backup and restore problematic as well.  Did you run chkdsk on all partitions of the HDD even hidden ones like recovery partitions?

If you have not you should as you might just fix the issue in doing so.  Have a look at the link below for more information.

Fix Disk Corruption

I would avoid doing much with the failing HDD. If I had a backup of the disk, I would go to SpinRite first before trying any cloning operations. Every time you use the disk, you run the risk of developing more bad sectors resulting in more data loss. I've used SpinRite in the past with great success. It is your best chance of saving your system without data loss.

There are programs that will copy the disk to a smaller disk and claim to handle bad sectors. I don't really know what that means. I suspect it just means the disk copy will succeed if there are bad sectors on the source disk. I doubt it means the data in the bad sectors will be saved. SpinRite is your best chance of saving all the data. EaseUS Disk Copy Pro 3.0 will handle bad sectors and copy to a smaller disk. When using the program, do not select the sector by sector copy method. This will require the target disk to be the same or larger than the source disk.

So to recap. Have a backup of the failing disk. Run SpinRite to repair the disk and save the data. Then decide whether to use a copy program like Disk Copy Pro or restore the backup with partition resizing to get the system on the new smaller SSD.