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Recovering to New Disk

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I'm getting warnings that my hard drive is failing. If I back it up now and replace it, will I be able to recover to the new disk with no problems?

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littleneil, the answer to your question has to be 'it depends!'

If your hard drive is failing, then my first question to you is to ask whether you already have a full drive backup from before these warnings started coming?  

If you do, then this may be needed to avoid having to do a fresh install of Windows if the failing drive cannot be successfully backed up.

If you don't have an existing backup, then you should make one as soon as possible but be prepared that Acronis True Image may 'stumble' during the process depending on the nature of the failing component for the hard drive, i.e. if it has a lot of bad sectors then ATI will not be able to save any data from these.

I would recommend making more than one backup of the failing drive so that you have more than one choice when trying to recover the backups to a new drive.

Provided you can get a successful backup of the old drive, then you should be able to Restore this to a new drive.

I would also recommend doing a CHKDSK /R for the failing drive but advise doing this after first trying to make the backup in case doing this makes matters worse as it could possibly do!

Once data is corrupted, it's corrupted.  Hopefully, if you backup... 1) it is successful, meaning that the disk isn't too far gone that it can't even backed up and 2) the content on the disk is not corrupted - that is a crap shoot depending on how bad the failing disk is.  As Steve mentioned, chkdslr /F /R may help identify bad sectors and mark them so they get skipped and/or data moved to non-bad sectors. But, even then, if the failing disk has caused any file corruption, even if it can be backed up, that corruption will still exist in a backup.  Worth a try though - better to save what data you can (hopefully all of it), than to lose it all by letting your disk get worse and worse until it does completely fail on you.  

First: stop using/connecting/accessing the drive until you are ready to perform the backup. The more you run a failing drive, the more likely it is to suffer further or complete loss. Just leave it unconnected until you have everything ready.

Second: boot from the ATI Rescue Media to perform the backup. That will take Windows out of the equation, put less stress on the drive and possibly make it more likely for you to get a useable backup. If you haven't created the ATI Rescue Media, do so using a different PC.