creating an image of a drive with bad sectors.

Would the data ever be written to a sector that the OS knew was bad? How would it know what sectors not to write to?

 

What happened when I was testing this was that if there really were bad sectors, TI would throw up an error message and quit. It ignored any info in the MFT about bad sectors and tried them anyway. (Remember, it's been a while since I had the tests run -- I'm retired now.)

 

"I'm retired now"

This is turning into one of those days where I wish I could say that!

 

The hardware determines what sectors can be used.

 

I have "saved" myself a rebuild on more than a few laptops by creating an image of them, then restoring to a fresh hard disk. In version 8, at least, if it gets to part of the disk it cannot read it will prompt you - sort of like a "Abort, retry, fail" prompt but with an extra choice to "ignore all". I cannot remember exactly the prompt.
I have done this by booting the machine with the recovery disk and backing up the entire drive to a server. In all cases these machines would not even boot, but worked fine upon restore. Now in my case, the EVO N610 C has been the model with problems. This particular model I have noticed has overheating problems with the HDD mounted next to the processor. Early bios versions not running the fan properly coupled with poor airflow design cause failure. They all seem to fail in the same manner with the first symptom being no boot or extremely long boot time due to read error. I explain this with detail because your situation may be very different - don't expect a miracle.