Cloning hard drive question

[flynempire]

Hello quick question about cloning a drive,

Got a stituation where a laptop has a hard drive that is failing. It is a Toshiba laptop and Windows 7 reports that the hard disc is in imminent danger of loosing files, etc.

It reports the hard drive has a problem and could go at any minute.

If somehow I had enough time to clone the drive to a brand new one, would it work?

For example if I do a successful clone will the problems with the original hard drive transfer over to the new or not?

Thanks for any answers.

[Detection]

Depends if anything is corrupted on the dying drive, if it manages to clone successfully before the drive causes any data loss, then it should be fine when you image it to the new HDD

But if the bad drive can't be read properly, then you`ll end up with problems with the image, if it lets you clone it with errors

[JJ_]

Adding to what Detection said, backup your most important data to external storage or another drive first, then by all means try and clone. I say this because you never know your drive might fluff it during cloning

[flynempire]

Ok thanks for clearing that up.

Let me ask something else.

Should I back up the data first just in case? Also if the image is bad on the new drive can I just format and install everything fresh and be OK?

[JJ_]

Yes, if the clone image causes problems you can format and start fresh on the new drive. Like I said in my post above backup your important files first. Once that is done, you can then start thinking about cloning

[flynempire]

Will do thank you..

[+Warwagon MVC]

Also if you are unable to clone due to bad sectors, you can do a sector by sector cone and ignore bad sectors.

[flynempire]

Yes that sounds good. I assume Acronis can do that for me

[LittleNeutrino Veteran]

Generally what I have done in the past is just setup the dying hard drive as an external drive and then clone the drives, and it has always worked for me in the past, even for hard drives that would not boot windows anymore.

[flynempire]

That is what I am going to do because if I run it within Windows on the dying drive it could fail right then and there

[DKAngel]

screw cloning, just start copyying the stuff

[s30]

Run chkdsk first with /r options it will cast out bad sectors from your usable disk space it may take longer depending on your hard drive but if you create backup image after that possibility of data corruption maybe slightly lower than before.

[DKAngel]

Run chkdsk first with /r options it will cast out bad sectors from your usable disk space it may take longer depending on your hard drive but if you create backup image after that possibility of data corruption maybe slightly lower than before.

that wont help if the drive is almost toast, bad sectors are one thing drive failure is another

[flynempire]

Hello again. I wanted to post an update.

Well Acronis did not work for me but Macrium Reflect Free did. What a nice and easy program to use. The clone was done but it brought file system errors with it. I did backup all the files first. In the end I had to re-install everything from scratch which was the correct thing to do.

I will use Macrium againg though as it is easy to use. The new hard drive was also a WD Advance Format drive which I had never dealt with. It gave me some problems but Toshiba support helped me out. Everything is back to normal.

Thanks again for all the help