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Imaging a hard drive with damaged sectors

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Hello,

I have an old XP laptop that has confirmed damaged sectors and will no longer boot into Windows.

Ive been quoted a small fortune to get my photos etc and am willing to attempt recovery myself.

I have Acronis True Image 2013 installed on another computer and have created the Boot CD.

I don't intend to keep the old laptop so I don't need to clone the hard drive etc.

Would the best option to be using the boot cd to create a .tib image onto an external hard drive (making sure that ignore damaged sectors is ticked)

Then opening that image in my other computer and copying files from the image to a folder on my other computer?

I assume that 'ignore damaged sectors' means all the non corrupted files would be saved correct?

Or am I confusing myself with technobabble :-)

Hope this makes sense,

Paul

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Paul,

I assume you have tried to repair the sectors by using chkdsk /r.

If you have put the laptop hard drive into a caddy and attaching it to a working computer you can image it from within Windows, otherwise it will need to be imaged from the recovery CD.

You have two choices, the one you've mentioned or by selecting a sector by sector image. The latter will definitely give you an image the same size as the original used space of the laptop drive. The method you mention may or may not do the same, if the damage is so bad that TI is unable to read major parts of the disk, it will auto revert to sector by sector imaging.

You mention that you can no longer boot into Windows on this drive, but are you able to access it when attached to another PC via a USB drive? If you can't (either from the command prompt or from Windows) explore the disk, imaging it might not work either, it really depends on if the damaged sectors are physical or if it is just parts of the disk have been marked by the drive firmware as unavailable.