Is it possible to backup a HDD with a bad sector?

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abang02

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Feb 20, 2017
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I took apart an old laptop to salvage some parts and found that the HDD was making some noises when I connected it. So, I tried to back it up and replace it using EaseUS, but the program would not complete the back up, telling me that the drive had a bad sector.

So, I ran chkdsk and found that only 4kb were written to bad sectors... Tried fixing it, but to no avail. Can I still back the drive up using a different program/method?

Any help is much appreciated, thanks.
 
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I assume when you say, "I tried to back it up and replace it using EaseUS", you mean you tried to use EaseUS to make a clone copy to a new HDD. Very often clone utilities have a problem with a source drive with Bad Sectors that cannot be read cleanly. However, some have been designed with a way to ignore such problems and keep on cloning the rest of the source disk, anyway. I had a situation like that, but was using a different cloning utility. It kept stopping with an error message that a Sector could not be read, and each time I would click on its option to continue working. Eventually I got tired of that and clicked a different option to ignore all such errors and keep working. It did that with no more messages. The final resulting...
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Paperdoc

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Oct 19, 2006
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I assume when you say, "I tried to back it up and replace it using EaseUS", you mean you tried to use EaseUS to make a clone copy to a new HDD. Very often clone utilities have a problem with a source drive with Bad Sectors that cannot be read cleanly. However, some have been designed with a way to ignore such problems and keep on cloning the rest of the source disk, anyway. I had a situation like that, but was using a different cloning utility. It kept stopping with an error message that a Sector could not be read, and each time I would click on its option to continue working. Eventually I got tired of that and clicked a different option to ignore all such errors and keep working. It did that with no more messages. The final resulting clone copy on a new disk has always worked perfectly for me. It appears I was lucky and the only Sectors that were unreadable were not actually used for any file I need.

I don't know whether EaseUS has a feature like this. Take another look at it, or call their Tech Support people.
 
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doh

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Jul 9, 2012
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I discovered that ignoring any errors (Easeus does not seem to have that 'bulk ignore' utility, and so I had to identify each bad sector and fix it using one of Seagate's disk utilities - I don't think it ios available any more, but it tests disks for bad sectors) did not rectify the problem, and some of the many sectors rendered the clone more unusable that the original, which I "fixed" used method just described. So now the original system partition and all info is lost.
It was a very old disk but one that I previously had no problems with
Fortunately I had a back up which seems to work (not recent, but I had little used that system since I made the back up)
I've yet to try recovering the system from the recovery partition.....(destroys all data and subsequently installed programs, and that's if it works: but nothing to lose)

Doh!
30.May.2018
 
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