1
The one drive I keep seeing people clone with bad sectors
I work at a small shop in Austin and at least twice a month someone brings in a laptop where they tried to clone a dying hard drive themselves. They use some free tool, ignore the bad sector warnings, and then wonder why the new drive won't boot or keeps crashing. Last week a guy brought in a 2017 Dell that he spent 3 hours trying to clone. He showed me the log and there were over 400 reallocated sectors that the software skipped right over. I had to tell him that cloning a failing drive without pausing to stabilize it first is basically copying corruption. Now I've got his original drive in a reader trying to pull what I can sector by sector. Has anyone else had customers who insisted their DIY clone was fine until they saw the blue screen?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
ivanl761mo agoMost Upvoted
Free tools skip bad sectors by design" - if you know what you're doing that can save a dying drive perfectly fine.
7
gibson.oliver1mo ago
Wow, I read a white paper once that compared cloning tools and how they handle bad sectors, and the difference was honestly scary. Some of those free programs just mark the bad spot as "done" and move on without even trying to read the data around it. I heard from a data recovery guy that you actually need to slow the read speed way down and let the drive's firmware reallocate things on its own before you even start. Otherwise you're basically taking a perfect copy of a broken drive and expecting it to work. That 400 reallocated sector count you saw is a huge red flag, no free tool in default mode is built for that. People see "clone" in the name and think it's magic, but it's more like trying to photocopy a book with half the pages torn out.
2