Restore an Image to a repaired HD?

I am interested in adding drive imaging to my backup scheme, but I am a bit confused about one issue. Having just repaired some bad sectors in my HD I want to make sure an image will avoid the need to reinstall applications if it happens again. So...

Assume I experience another bad sector problem on my HD and I then repair the HD using the manufacturer's diagnostic tools. Will a disk image restore to this HD when the bad sectors have been quarrantined (reallocated)?

That is, if the image file has data to be restored to sector "nnn" and sector "nnn" is not available due to the repair, will the restore still work around this?

I am running a Dell 8400, with WinXP Pro, SP2;
Seagate 160 GB SATA boot disk; WD 250 GB HD for secondary storage, and an external networked HD for backups using Windows BU utility.

Thanks.

 

Housailorr,

Getting a good answer about bad sectors is difficult. This thread is a start.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=ghost9_10;action=display;num=1174501169

 

I received this reply from Acronis regarding restoring an image file to a HD that has had bad sectors reallocated after the image was made:

"We do not expect any difficulties with restoring to the repaired Hard Disk Drive so please feel free to perform this operation."

Therefore, I guess it should work!

 

When a sector is reallocated, the "bad" physical sector is remapped to another physical sector.

To the outside world (the OS and the file system) the sector is available as before. When the OS wants to read or write that "bad" sector, the drive will access the reallocated sector instead of the original sector.

Expect problems when the drive runs out of spare sectors so that it can no longer reallocate bad sectors.

Danny
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If your HD is showing bad sectors with chkdsk, you have a time bomb. By all means create an image now but expect to restore it to a new HD in the "future". How many bad sectors are reported?