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Acronis True Image cloning problem bad sectors!

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When I first started using Acronis True Image several years ago I had no problem cloning my laptop hard drives to an identical hard drive connected to a USB port.. Then I started experiencing problems cloning because of bad sectors on either the source drive or the destination drive. After numerous attempts to clone using Acronis True Image I decided to stop wasting my time using the program all together. Hard drives do develop bad sectors over time but there should be a way to copy a hard drive that may have bad sectors to a hard drive that may have bad sectors that is bootable, it may not be an exact clone but it should be possible to do that. Is there any way that Acronis True Image can be made to deal with copying from and to hard drives that have bad sectors and still make a bootable look-alike copy? Is there some kind of work-around with Acronis TI I am missing here?

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Tom, welcome to these public User Forums.

Any disk with bad sectors will pose problems for most, if not all, applications like Acronis True Image and will only store up other more serious problems for later.

ATI will attempt to clone disk with bad sectors but will switch to using a sector-by-sector mode of operation, which will then require the source & target drives to be of the same size or the target drive to be larger than the source.

When cloning laptop drives, then other considerations come into play and the target drive should be installed internally in the laptop for it to be used as a boot device after the clone completes.

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.