how do i clone a hard drive that has errors ( bad sectors)

emmettklitz

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Aug 1, 2014
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I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop running vista and want to clone the drive because it has read error and s.m.a.r.t shows drive is about to die . Old drive is 160gb (2007) and new drive is 500gb . reinstall/restore software does not support new drive .So now what?
 
Solution
It may not be the fact that the reinstall or restore software supports the drive.
But the fact that the laptops bios cannot recognize a drive over a set size, in other words it has a limitation on the physical hard drive capacity it can see, and address.

After all yout talking about 7 years ago here when it was a new laptop, and likely 500Gb drives never physically existed for use in laptops.

Its pretty easy to tell if it is the cause, because if you enter the bios of the drive, and it does not report the true size of the 500Gb drive then you know the bios can not address the drive space due to its age, since a drive of 500Gb never existed at the time or was programmed in the bios firmware.

So what to do.?

You could pre format the...
It may not be the fact that the reinstall or restore software supports the drive.
But the fact that the laptops bios cannot recognize a drive over a set size, in other words it has a limitation on the physical hard drive capacity it can see, and address.

After all yout talking about 7 years ago here when it was a new laptop, and likely 500Gb drives never physically existed for use in laptops.

Its pretty easy to tell if it is the cause, because if you enter the bios of the drive, and it does not report the true size of the 500Gb drive then you know the bios can not address the drive space due to its age, since a drive of 500Gb never existed at the time or was programmed in the bios firmware.

So what to do.?

You could pre format the drive on another computer, that will take and read a drive size of 500gb overall.
Then split the over all size, into three partitions of around 160Gb each.

That way when placed in your old laptop it should read at least one of the partitions and you can install the os without problems. Any bad sectors on the old drive may be ignored if trying to clone.

Please remember that you have to format a drive before you try to clone or copy anything to it.
You cannot simply Put the drive in and ask it to copy or clone. because no file table exists. a drive is in factory raw mode and has to be formatted first.
Often a mistake people make, it has to be formatted first.


 
Solution

gmeades

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Apr 8, 2012
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You have to use a different program to clone your drive, like Paragon Hard Drive Manager. This software will recognize your new drive (if you've got it powered using an auxiliary source, and connected to your usb port using an adapter - they sell these hard drive adapters on eBay for abou $12).

When bad clusters are found on your old drive, Paragon will ask if you would like it to ignore this and any future bad clusters. Tell it yes, and it will continue copying your entire drive to the new drive. Then just install the new drive, and start using the laptop with the new drive installed.

Don't worry about doing anything to the new drive at all beforehand either. Any cloning software, including Paragon, will format the drive as part of the cloning process.
 


Shaun:
With respect to your comment that a (destination) drive needs to be formatted before it can be the recipient of a clone. This just isn't so with many, if not most, disk-cloning programs. The program I routinely work with, Casper, has no problem cloning the contents of a source drive to a unpartitioned, unformatted drive. We accomplish this routinely.

Ditto for the Macrium Reflex Free program that seems to be a popular disk-cloning program judging from the references I see re this program on this Forum. And all, or virtually all, the "data migration" programs that are bundled with new SSDs can clone the contents of a source disk to a "virgin" SSD.