I have a drive that SMART shows as "[C6] Off-Line Uncorrectable Sector Count: 199/Always OK, Worst: 199 (Data = 94)" Can I image it without issues? Even if the imaging program pauses and barks about a sector it sees an error on? Is there any imaging program that specializes in this type of situation? I really, really do not want to install everything again on this drive. It is highly customized.
No, but I did run regular Check Disc. It listed 12 KB in bad sectors. I ran 2 disc health programs that read SMART info and they both have the message in my first post. The PC runs normally for days and then out of the blue, it will freeze. I should have suspected it sooner but hind sight is 20/20. Dell is going to replace the drive but as I noted, it is highly tweaked for several programs. Setting it up again would be painful!
You should be OK. I've copied partitions (or image/restore) with many more than 12 kb of bad sectors and haven't noted any issues. I suggest you create an image and then try chkdsk /r from an Admin Command Prompt to see if the sectors can be repaired. Then create another image.
Thanks for the replies. The replacement drive arrives in a day or so. I'll know where I stand soon...
Apparently your Drive is dying. If I were in your situation, I'd follow Brian's advice to do a disk image right now, and one more after trying to correct the bad sector. That is, I assume you have a spare drive laying around. If you wait, the situation might get worse. Bad sectors could spread.
As far as I can tell, the drive will be here on Wednesday (tomorrow.) I have made an image with IFL. I will kick off a repair suing CHKDSK this afternoon and we'll see what happens.
Another incorrect assumption of mine. Did you do an Entire Drive image with IFL? They are the easiest solution when restoring to a new HD.
I agree that was/is the best thing to try. The CHKDSK repair is running now. It will be sometime overnight before it can finish. So tomorrow morning, we'll see how it looks. The new drive should arrive tomorrow too.
chkdsk /r did not help. PC wouldn't boot. So my only option for an image is the first one I have. New drive came today. Imaged the factory setup that came on the new drive in case I need it. Then restored my original image. New drive booted. Ran a standard chkdsk. Confusingly, it shows 12KB in bad sectors (like the bad HDD). But SMART says the disc is ok. Ran sfc /scannow. It shows some corrupted files that can't be fixed. But it seems to run ok. So... Is there anything else I can do to minimize any further issues? My thoughts are to run and see what happens. Last thought. I read around the net that an image doesn't transfer bad sectors. But this situation seems to indicate it can/does. Thoughts??
A bad sector is a hardware issue, and it can not possibly be transferred to the new drive. However, if you had data in the bad sectors that was not recovered by chkdsk, then that data will be missing on the new hard drive, and the files corresponding to the bad sectors will be corrupted. I would just run chkdsk on the new drive from within windows with the "automatically fix file system" and "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" options checked. It will correct the anomaly you are describing, which probably is just the attributes from the previous hard drive transferred to the new drive and not actual bad sectors on the new drive.
I had a similar situation some time ago. After restoring a full sector by sector image to a new HDD and restoring some damaged files separately from an older file based backup, CHKDSK would still report some bad sectors which were obviously part of the image backup. The only method I found (after a lot of research) was using a tool called 'DFSee'. http://imgur.com/0a0a78w Cheers manolito
In this case, a fresh installation of your OS and applications is the best option. Other method MAY work, but who knows you'll encounter what problems later on. I'd format the new drive and start from scratch. This way I know my OS will be fine, so no headache in the future.
There should be absolutely no need to do a clean install of Windows. I've cloned hard drives before that would not boot due to errors, and after cloning the drives and running chkdsk on the new drive, the new drive has booted and run Windows without any issues.
I believe in your story. However, your case does not mean the OP's case will also result in a 100% working OS. He already found corrupted files in 12k sectors. So having problems is sooner or later.
HAN, as you and others suspect there are no bad sectors on the new HD. The bad sectors table has been restored from the previous system. This is standard. Run chkdsk /b and the table will be reset. The "bad sectors" will be gone. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730714.aspx
A big thanks to all that contributed! I certainly learned some valuable information. I ran the chkdsk /b routine and it indeed has cleared the Bad Sectors count. So, I'm good there now. oliverjia points out that I should start over for the best results. I absolutely agree but as I noted initially, this PC is tweaked to an extreme. If any of errors I've ran across ever do cause a problem that can't be dealt with, I can always go back to square one at that point. In the FWIW category, Dell wants the old drive back so I am DBAN'ing now and it will go out soon. But for now, I'm back in business!!