Q: OK, Im not a noob, but I try something that has me stumped.
Is there a way to clone, copy or do as a drive with bad sectors to a new replacement drive? The drives are identical in format. It is WindowsXP Home, and it is NTFS. It is still active, but it has bad sectors and they nuked a few files. It is not me – it was someone else and they do not ask for loss of data, except for bad sectors corrupted.
I tried:
1) Western Digital Installation of utilities (they suffocate in the bad sectors)
2) Norton Ghost 2002 disk-to-disk clone (ditto) 0.
Would using Ghost mode transfer everything in each sector, and if so, would the transfer of corrupted data? (It will not replicate the bad sectors on the new disk, will it?)
Is there a way to do this other than a clean install and copying the data?
Thanks in advance.
Best Answer: Your guess may be right. This can happen due to bad sectors of the compute. The following is the path to activate the disc checker
– Open “My Computer”
– Right click the OS drive you want to check (for example C: if you install XP to c: drive)
– Select “Properties” from the menu
– Click “Tools” tab
– Press “Check Now” button
– Make sure you thick the two options to “Automatically fix errors” and “Attempt to recover bad sectors”
– Stat scan
This will try to solve the problem for you. But as I have experienced, you can get a small relief from this problem if your file system is NTFS. FAT32 is very bad for bad sectors.
Re:Got it running! guy's recommendation of using Backup on another system to copy the entire partition and then restoring it to the new drive worked. It was a SOB to make boot again, but that got all the data transferred where ghost and the drive company utilities failed.
Thanks!
Re:if ghost disk-to-disk won't work the only alternative is to backup your data files, and do a fresh install, the only reason it wouldn't work is because of fatal read errors on the host disk.
Re:In the command prompt (Make sure your in the appropriate drive letter, for instance "Re:\>") and type "diskcopy c: d:".
This won't work. It's NTFS. DOS can't see NTFS. There won't even be a C: drive if I boot with a dos disk.
guy: those are good ideas….going to try them. Why didn't I think of that! Thanks!
Re:I've had quite a bit of experience with this recently…
You can either install the bad drive and the new drive into another machine, and do a select all / copy, pase (make sure you can see hidden/system files). Whenever a file can't copy, right it down, and skip it.
OR
Do as above, but instead of a manual copy use the Windows 2000/XP Backup utility, backup the entire partition, and then restore the entire backup to the new drive. The utility will automatically skip files that are too corrupted to copy.
Re:Originally posted by: guy
Nice theory, but it doesn't work. Ghost and the WD utility give the same errors after chkdsk with repair as without running it.
Even a sector-by-sector Ghost clone fails, even when using the -BFC switch which tells it to ignore bad sectors!
Anybody have any ideas?
Get yourself a dos boot disk with diskcopy, get yourself to a command prompt with both drives installed, one as master, one as slave.
In the command prompt (Make sure your in the appropriate drive letter, for instance "Re:\>") and type "diskcopy c: d:".
Obviously change the drive letters to match yours, i imagine this is what they would be anyway. The first drive letter is the drive with the data on, the second drive letter is the one you want to copy the data too 
Hope this helps.
Dan
Re:Nice theory, but it doesn't work. Ghost and the WD utility give the same errors after chkdsk with repair as without running it.
Even a sector-by-sector Ghost clone fails, even when using the -BFC switch which tells it to ignore bad sectors!
Anybody have any ideas?
Re:ghost, do a disk to disk transfer, it will automatically size the maximum partition and load everything, just make sure you do a full chkdsk /r(nt,2000,xp) or a full scandisk /r?(don't remember the exact switch for repair option)
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