Imaging of suspected bad hard disks

Of course I prefer to have my system partition cleanest possible when doing a system backup, just right after windows installment.

But often I have come across people who want to do a windows imaging even when they suspect the hard disk is bad, so to be able to restore the system.

This sounds silly to me. But to be more sure, I want to hear your point of view on this matter. Because maybe, some imaging software like True Image (I´m using TI9) is able to do that magic and restoring some kind of healthier system right from the image.

To me, of course this makes no sense, or is this really possible?

 

If one knows that a disk is bad, an image is the wrong thing to do.

 

Hi,

sometimes a hard disk has several bad sectors and you have important data on it. In that case acronis gives you a good chance to "repair" your system by cloning to a new harddrive and then make a windows repair installation. You then have a good chance that the information on the defect sectors of your old harddrive are replaced by the repair installation AND you don't loose your important data.

Last time I used the bad sectors were IN the pagefile causing BSODS in windows. After cloning and deleting the pagefile everything was ok.

Other cloning software completely cancelled the process at the "bad sector", acronis gave me the chance to "ignore all" ;-)

Volker

 

This was nice to hear. I will think of this method if I will be in need of it myself. Thanks for this interesting reply.

Yes I agree, it would be illogical.

 

Hello Initiverse,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are very sorry for the delay with the response.

Please take a look at the previous thread titled creating an image of a drive with bad sectors explaining in detail how hard drives containing bad sectors can be backed up.

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

"If one knows that a disk is bad, an image is the wrong thing to do."
"Yes I agree, it would be illogical."

But it's not.

It was most counterintuitive to me at first, but after reading an interesting discussion on this forum I made a rule to always make the final backup of an unhealthy system state (the one I want to get rid of, yes) before restoring to a previous state. So I'm able to restore at my leisure (by the Mount option) any files I happen to miss after the restore has been carried out.

Of course I mark the image of the unhealthy state accordingly, so it won't be used for a full restore.

 

If I had a failing disk and was concerned about retaining the data on it, I would be making every kind of a backup possible just in case it might come in handy. That would include an image.

This topic makes me think of one of my rules, (Howard has them so I can too ).

Keep your data away from C and pay attention to routine data backups.

You can always get back to XP and installed apps. You'll just lose time. Lose your pictures, documents, spreadsheets that you've created and you have a bigger problem.

 

I always backup my DATA onto DVD both DL and SL. I keep several copies of it some on site, some off site.

In a pinch I can reload all of my C:\drive. Acronis just makes it faster.

Point is I agree with Seekforever keep your DATA away from the C:\ drive.

 

Thanks for responding to this thread, Acronis Support. I will look at this.

Not bad, this too makes sense.