Can a bad drive corrupt a new drive?

Letalis

Honorable
Jul 2, 2012
5
0
10,510
My hard drive is going down fast(besides other blatant symptoms, the computer's constant reminders to back up my information because the hard drive is failing) and I'm wondering a few things. First, I'm moderately computer literate, but I've never had to deal with switching hard drives, so this is new territory for me. Is this something I can just transfer the hard drive information wholesale to a new one? Or should I stick with saving the important stuff on an external drive and do the new one from scratch? Second, part of first one, could the way my hard drive is taking a nose dive negatively impact my new hard drive if I do a straight transfer over? I did a CrystalDiskInfo diagnostic and I'll leave the main info in here. If anyone needs the extra log info, let me know and I'll post that too. Thanks for the help!

-- S.M.A.R.T. --------------------------------------------------------------
ID Cur Wor Thr RawValues(6) Attribute Name
01 _85 _85 _16 0000007A0074 Read Error Rate
02 142 142 _54 000000000047 Throughput Performance
03 128 128 _24 000300B300B3 Spin-Up Time
04 100 100 __0 000000000736 Start/Stop Count
05 __1 __1 __5 00000000065D Reallocated Sectors Count
07 100 100 _67 000000000000 Seek Error Rate
08 110 110 _20 000000000024 Seek Time Performance
09 _99 _99 __0 000000002052 Power-On Hours
0A 100 100 _60 000000000000 Spin Retry Count
0C 100 100 __0 000000000482 Power Cycle Count
C0 _99 _99 __0 00000000076A Power-off Retract Count
C1 _99 _99 __0 00000000076A Load/Unload Cycle Count
C2 206 206 __0 0028000D001D Temperature
C4 __1 __1 __0 0000000009E9 Reallocation Event Count
C5 100 100 __0 000000000000 Current Pending Sector Count
C6 100 100 __0 000000000000 Uncorrectable Sector Count
C7 200 200 __0 000000000003 UltraDMA CRC Error Count
 

robnof

Honorable
Oct 9, 2012
491
0
10,960
To my understanding, a bad drive won't corrupt another drive unless its littered with viruses or malware, even then it's just a matter of data loss and not hardware troubles. As long as the data isn't corrupted, cloning your data should not be an issue.