Will Acronis True Image WD Edition clone a drive that has bad sectors?

If you know you have bad sectors, you don't want those in your image-- what good are they? Run a chckdsk /r before you make your backup to cleanup bad sectors or mark them off and put them out of use -- if out of use, then they won't be included in the backup or clone image -- not unless you force a sector by sector backup.

Generally, ati doesn't crash if it comes across a bad sector but does something akin to waht ntaf normally does -- it retires a limited number of times and if not successful, then geratates an error and tirggers an error handling routine. However, the retries can greatly slow down the backup process if there are lots of bad or poorlyt readable sectors. So it's a good idea to clean up the drive becfr you try to backup if you suspectd bad sectors.

If the hadisk is in such bad shape that your fear it will not survive a chkdsk without creating even more bad sectors, then you have probably waited too long to create a decent back. If you do create a backup under these conditions, running a validation imeediately afterwards will not determine whether the backup is faithful to the source -- it only determines that backup is unchanged from the time whenit was created.

I'd recommend doing a Disk Mode backup rather than a clone. Wtih a backup you can save more than one image on a storage/target disk; you still have it even after you start using a new disk with the backed up image put onto it (you get second chances in case you need them).

Daniel K,

From your original post, it looks like the number of bad sectors is increasing fast. Your disk is probably dying. Not sure that running chkdsk /r is going to help at this point and may increase the stress on the disk in its last hours... Your call... If you think this is the case, forget the chkdsk and do a complete (ie all partitions) disk and partition backup and replace your disk. If the backup doesn't complete, do a sector-by-sector backup from the Acronis recovery CD.

Scott Hieber and Pat L,

Thanks for your responses.

I do not believe my hard drive is imminently terminal. The drive is 9 years old, and I have done ScanDisk passes for a number of years that discovered and replaced bad clusters in files. The last ScanDisk report indicated I now have 1552 KB in bad sectors. The drive boots and it generally functions fine. My worry is simply that if in cloning I just found even one bad sector it couldn't handle it and would abort cloning. I can live with a few bits and bytes not being copied out of 80 GB.  I'm already living with the few files that are partially corrupt due to bad sectors, most of which are images.  I just don't want to test my luck any longer.

Can one of you, or someone else, answer the following specific questions for me?

1) Does the "Ignore bad sectors" option work when cloning (not backing up) a drive? If not, does that mean, based on what Scott wrote, that I need do nothing special for the cloning process to complete successfully?

2) I'm having trouble with terminology people use here. What I want to do is swap out my old bootable system drive with a new bootable system drive, which is why I want to "clone" it. What I've read about backups doesn't seem to fit that purpose, unless I'm misunderstanding what a "backup" is. My definition is either file by file or large compressed files that I can recover at a later time. Not what I want. Or is that incorrect?

Thanks again!

As you clone or backup, you can instruct ATI to ignore bad sectors. Scott H advice is sound: run chkdsk /r first to mark the bad sectors, than do the clone.

I also concur with Scot that you should do a backup. Once the backup is done, it is done and reusable, while your original disk can continue degrading, adding bad sectors, etc...
Once you have done your backup, you can restore it on the new disk and will get the same result as a clone.
Just make sure you include all the partitions in the backup, and do the restore/clone from the recovery CD.

Pat,

Excuse my ignorance, but if I did a backup, where would I put it?  I have only the old drive I want to replace, and the new one I want to replace it with.  I have no space on my old drive to put the backup.  If I were to put it on the new drive I suspect I would have to have a partition in place for it, then another for the restore, and then I'd end up with less space than I want on the new drive, or the need to delete the backup and resize my restored to partition.  That sounds like a lot more time and effort than just making a clone, especially since I don't intend to use the old drive once cloned, I just intend to swap in the new replacement, cloned to copy.

Daniel,
You are making sense. You would store the backup on a USB disk (that works best). A backup creates no risk for the source disk. A cloning process does. If you cannot do a backup, you have to take the risk to do a clone, obviously.

Pat L wrote:

A backup creates no risk for the source disk. A cloning process does. If you cannot do a backup, you have to take the risk to do a clone, obviously.

What kind of risk are you talking about?  When I try to access a file in a bad sector via Windows Explorer, for example, my disk churns and I have to wait a minute or so until it gives up.  I would suspect a backup process would have the same trouble, and incur the same disk access attempt.  The only difference I can see is that a file by file access is more coarse grained in nature than a bit by bit clone would be, and potentially the bit by bit attempt would hit more bad sectors.  Is that what you're suggesting?

On the other hand, wouldn't the bit by bit copy simply skip a bad sector once it discovers one (i.e. mark it as bad, and not bother with further bits in the sector)?  And wouldn't it completely ignore empty disk space (or does it not know the difference between used and unused disk space)?

The cloning and the disk and partition backup process use the same technology. The only difference is that the cloning process lays out the information directly on another disk while the backup process stores it in a "temporary" container ( a TIB file).

On this forum, we have seen users lose disks because of user errors, power interruptions or other hardware failure during a cloning process where both the source and the target ended up screwed up. Most of the time the source remains OK.

Not that cloning is bad or less reliable. Don't get me wrong. IMO, it should be used only when a disk and partition backup is not possible.

That doesn't sound right to me. The documentation at http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/ATIH2010WD_userguide_en.pdf, section 15.2, states:

"Please note the following: if the power goes off or you accidentally press RESET during the transfer, the procedure will be incomplete and you will have to partition and format or clone the hard disk again. No data will be lost because the original disk is only being read (no partitions are changed or resized). The system transfer procedure does not alter the original disk at all."

It explicitly indicates that the original disk is only being read.  Now, I can understand if your concern was that my drive is in such bad shape that just reading from it will further damage it, and that may well be, but that's a problem I'm having to live with already with my everyday use of it, albeit, not at the level a full clone process would do, which would read every last inch of the disk to complete the task.

But then again, since my disk is 92% full, it seems to me that a backup process would essentially result in just as much read activity on my drive as a full disk clone, correct?

As long as your bad hdsik is running, it probably going to be losing more and more of its sectors -- whether you are writing,or not-the drive is going kaput. It's like walking a bleeding man to the hsopital; everystep pushes more blood out of his veins and just standing still, he still bleeds.

"Disk full x%" only measure the percetnage of usable sectors that contain info. If sectors are marked out of use, then the ntfs system won't use them and there will be nothing in them and nothing geting backed up from them, regardless how how many useable sectors are actually in use.

This is not the time to be doing a backup, this is when you toss out a hadisk and do restore from a backup made bvefore the disk went bad. So, in your case yu can try doing a backup but you OS or programs stand a good chance of being messed up when you restore. Otoh, you might be able to get some of your data files out of a backup -- some of it might be good some of might not, dpending on how mahy of the sectors in use have gone bad.

So the response seems to be that the sky is falling, yet, as I've tried to point out, I don't have (at least IMO) a lot of bad sectors, just enough for me to be concerned that one bad sector would cause the clone to fall over itself.  Here is the result of my ScanDisk from a couple of days ago:

I may be bleeding, but I've been bleeding for years, so I would think I'm not going to be dead within a matter of days.

Sounds like, if what you've said before is correct, that a clone process using Acronis True Image WD Edition can complete even if it finds a bad sector, then that's what I needed to know.  Doing a backup is not an option for me.  Tossing my old drive and starting from scratch is not an option either as we're talking about a drive with 9 years of stuff on it that would take me ages to reinstall and reestablish.  I'm guessing you guys, given your thousands of posts here, do this for a living and have plenty of drives and options available to you.  I'm just a lowly PC user who plans to do this once and is looking for the best hassle/success ratio I can achieve.  Based on my experience with this drive, as long as ATI can clone it I can live with whatever bits it had to leave behind since I'm already doing so now.  Then I'll look into maintaining better backups going forward.

Thanks guys for your help.

Follow-up:

I have successfully cloned my old 80GB drive to a new 320GB drive but given what was said above I thought I would add a few words about my experience.

Before cloning I ran one more ScanDisc. It found 4 more bad sectors only 10 days after my previous ScanDisc.

I added the new drive as a slave. Created a bootable recovery CD via Media Builder (more on that later). Ensured the new drive was discovered in the boot setup. And then selected the Clone option with a proportional partition. The cloning process took about 3½ hours. I then shutdown and removed the old drive, made the new one the master, turned off the second drive in the boot setup and booted up fine.

No cloning issues. Bad sectors did not cause it to fail.

However, the "Ignore bad sectors" option available in ATI as installed appears to have no bearing on my cloning via the bootable media. The option was not available to me at that time. So if ATI came across a new bad sector, and I suspect it could have, it didn't choke on it. However, I didn't get any kind of good estimate on how long the cloning process had yet to go until after it had been running for 1½ hours and appeared to be about half way through according to the progress bar, which I found odd. For the longest time it reported that I had far less time to go than I actually did.

Back to the Media Builder: what a pain that was. I ran through 4 CD-R discs trying to create a bootable CD. I kept getting "Invalid Media" dialogs. I searched the forums and tried a few things to no avail. I was just about ready to give up when I tried one last time, but this time only selecting to put ATI on the CD, and not the Acronis System Report software. I used a CD-RW disc and it finally worked. No idea why including Acronis System Report would cause so much hassle given all these discs would have had plenty of room on them. Another issue with the failures was that I found I also had to fix registry settings (based on info from Microsoft and this thread - http://forums.techguy.org/hardware/525621-solved-dvd-cd-rom-drive.html) that caused my CD writer drive to no longer function. I'm guessing that Media Builder did something to cause that.

So that was my story. The whole process took me 10 hours, but I appear to have a larger working clone, as desired. Hopefully the new drive, Western Digital WD3200AAJB, is solid and will last me as long or longer than my old 9 year old Maxtor.

You could have downloaded an iso from the acronis.com webstie product updates page and burned that using any cd burner of your choice (I like imgburn--easy to use, but very flxible and it's free). Generally when I had trouble such as you describe, it was a problem with the cd drive not the burner program but it canhappen the other way around.

glad you finally got your new hdisk set up.

The fact that more bad sectors showed up wihtin ten days is a stronger indication that your original hdisk was going south. Typicak hdisk failure is for bad sectors to show up ocassionally, and then with ever increasing frequency until your software beeomces totally wonked or yourhdisk simply wont' operate. AT todays prices, it doesn't pay to wait. If a hdisl is suspect, best to replace it -- all the better if it's still under warranty.
regards

I have been backing up my data for the past 6 months using Arconis True Image(Daily backup). I started this when my hard drive was a 100 percent healthy. Yesterday when I used my machine, my hard drive failed and when I ran a health check it was only 20%. I would like to know if I will be able to recover all the data when my machine was at 100%.

Thank you

You can if:
1) the source drive was good when you backed it up
2) the drive you backed up onto was and is still good
2) you are restoring to a good drive, not the one that reads 20% (if a drive has that many bad sectors, it should rpobably be junked). Rule of thumb, once bad sectors start showing up they keep showing up faster and faster. A few you might mark bad and keeep using the drive for a while but if more show up, it's time to replace the drive and no longer trust the bits that are on it. Drives are cheap to replace, err on the side of caution.