Cloning drive with sector errors

[cripp]

I have a Maxtor 40 G hard drive in my computer now, which I have Windows XP installed. All of a sudden, everything started running real slow. So I performed the check disk, and it came back bad sector errors. I run Norton disk Doctor, and it marked the sector's bad, then I went in chkdsk /r and it went through the five stages, and everything checked out okay. I ran that three more times, and it told me it was okay. I got a new 160 GB hard drive and tried to clone the old drive with Norton and Acronis in both programs came up with disk sector read errors.

How can I clone this drive, or do I just have to back up everything like my documents and settings and reinstall Windows on the new drive? I really don't wanna have to do that because of the programs I have installed what are your ideas

 

[enlightenment]

Chkdsk only checks metadata im sure, not file contents.

You can clone your broken disk using the following command under Linux/BSD:

dd if=/dev/sourcedrive of=/dev/targetdrive ibs=512 obs=1m conv=sync,noerror

You can use a livecd like FreeSBIE to do it. For example your sourcedrive (with bad sectors) is ad0, while your new drive is ad2. Your command would then look like:

dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/dev/ad2 ibs=512 obs=1m conv=sync,noerror

It will skip any bad sectors and just continue, leaving you with an almost pefect copy. You may also run SpinRite on the bad disk to try to heal the bad sectors (and reallocate them).