Imaged drive w bad sector. Restore to new drive has bad sector

I discovered one bad cluster (4K) on the only hard drive on a system by running chkdsk /r.

I made an image of the entire disk (all partitions) and restored it to a brand new hard drive.

The new hard drive now reports that C has on bad cluster (4K). I ran the Windows XP ErrorChecking to test and recover bad sectors that runs on booting. The bad cluster is still there.

I think I've seen this problem here before, but how do I get rid of the false bad sector "created" by the TI 8 Build 937 restore?

 

Apparently the solution is to resize the partition which will cause the bad sector information to be ignored. The resizing apparently doesn't have to be very much at all.

 

I remembered finally that that was the solution.

When I used Partition Magic to resize the C partition to 183GB, I left 392MB unallocated after restoring the Dell recovery partition. I made a new image of the entire disk and then restored only the C partition which allowed me to resize it from 183GB to 392MB larger (0.2% increase). After that, the bad sectors were gone.

As you said, the resizing "doesn't have to be very much at all."

Thanks for the quick response. If my mind were just a bit slower, it would have save me a lot of frustration.

The story behind this is one of good luck. I helped a client install some software at the end of March. At that time, I noticed that there was 4KB in bad sectors. I commented on this and suggested that they do a CHKDSK to see if the bad sectors increased. They didn't, but by May 4, the system wouldn't boot (at least 128KB in bad sectors).

Since I had made a TI 8.937 image of the entire disk to the client's USB hard drive before returning the system to them, it was a simple job of replacing their 80GB SATA drive with a 200GB SATA drive (the smallest I could find locally) and restoring the image from March 31.

After the full disk restore, I deleted the third partition which was the Dell recovery partition and should have repeated the restore of C and expanded it at that time to almost fill the drive leaving just enough space (3GB) for the Dell recovery partition so that the system was the same as before the drive failure. Instead I used Partition Magic to expand C and then restored the Dell recovery partition to the end of the small amount of unallocated space. But that left 392MB unallocated which was enough to fix the bad sector problem.

I'll eat the 30 minutes my error took to correct, and my client will get a bill a lot smaller because they purchased TrueImage at my recommendation.

 

Hello John and everyone interested,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Generally, it is not recommended to perform any operations with the hard drives having bad sectors as it may result in a complete data loss. However, as seekforever mentioned there is a workaround that allows to one to avoid transferring bad sectors to the new drive.

I am glad to hear that you were able to successfully use it in your case.

For further references let me point to the post where the workaround is described. <Re: creating an image of a drive with bad sectors.>

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

Aleksandr,

Thanks for the additional info.

I hadn't seen the machine earlier to image it before the drive started to fail, but I was fortunate to get this system just as the drive problems started when there were only 4Kb in bad sectors. As far as I can tell, the restored image is running properly.