New HD to be delivered by Fedx in 3 hours.

Hello,

I have just taken and verified an Acronis v 10 true image copy of my new laptops 100 gig hard drive (saved to a USB hard drive). VISTA reported yesterday that it could not read 3 sections of my hard drive and HP phone support verified by a test in the BIOS that the new hard drive failed all 7 of the hard drive tests they said proved it was bad.

OK, Fedx tracking says the new blank hard drive will be here in 3 hours.

I am now going to run TI and create bootable media.

When I install the new blank hard drive in the laptop here is my plan:

1. Start up with the bootable media.

2. Do an image restore on the entire disk (3 partitions, C , D (HP recovery), and T (my documents)).

I have used PowerQuest Drive Image, but this is my first attempt with Acronis.

Does this sound like it will work? THANKS, MH

 

You are going to make a backup of a drive known to be failing? Of course, it would have been better to make a backup before the drive went south. So your best best is to copy your data files to another drive if you have one just in case the bad drive messes up the ATI backup Make an ATI backup of the whole drive with ATI. Then try a restore with ATI to the new drive. If the ATI didn't backup or the file wan't validate, at least you still have some or all of you data files.

Uh, I guess you should run run chkdsk/r or its equivalent before doing anything else.

 

If the drive is failing, it is unlikely that you will be able to do a successful backup, nor can you be assured that a completed backup even has the files correctlybacked up.

You may need to resort to a data recovery service such as OnTrack. Indeed, that is the route I would suggest. Any further use of th drive could make matters worse.

Also, do NOT fiddle with the drive.
That could make matters worse.

 

As long as the bad sectors are not in use or not holding critical files, this should work. The fact that you can still boot and run Windows is a good indication that you will succeed. I've done this type of backup and restore successfully.

After you have the full image, backing up your data would be an excellent additional step as Shieber noted.

If you have run CHKDSK /R and bad sectors have been marked on the old drive, you will appear to still have those bad sectors when you restore the entire image to the new drive. This is normal. You can confirm this by running CHKDSK (without /R or /F) on each partititon to see which are reported to have bad sectors.

The fix is to repeat the restore of just the partitions which report bad sectors, but change the size by a small amount (a few hundred MB is enough). When TI resizes the partition, it will test the bad sectors and find them good. Rerun CHKDSK and confirm that no bad sectors are found.

Good luck. Let us know how it goes.

 

Not necessarily.

In order to boot and run Windows, only certain files need to be good.

However, a successful backuo requires both no errors in the file system structures and no errors in any of the sectors in which any files are recorded.

A number of years ago, I had a SCSI drive crap out.
Whilst waiting for the replacement drive, I decided to play with the bad drive.
I found that I could use the drive only if I reduced the partition size by about 3GB.

 

I agree with jmk here. I have restored from broken disks before with no consequences. As long as the images take successfully the worse thing that can happen is that it goes wrong, and you use the laptop's recovery CD to install afresh and just restore your documents etc., or have to replace a few system files.

Calling in the data recovery specialists is a rather extreme suggestion at this stage, especially as the system is still working!

 

HP split my order and only the HP recovery CD disk came by Fedx yesterday, not the new hard drive. I have been able to validate my ATI image backup as good (by running ATI validate image backup). Since I now have an HP recovery disk, and after installing the new hard disk, is there any reason to run HP recovery first, or would you just jump into the Image Restore by ATI? MH

 

That's entirely up to you. If you want to reinstall all your programs again then use the HP recovery disks. Doing so will also load all the trialware that is on those disks.
But if you had your system running how you like it and had no problems then load the backup image.

 

I'd just jump to the image restore as DwnNdrty suggested.

If you restored from the HP disks and then restored the TI image, you'd just wipe out what you did with the HP disks, so save that for later.