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klerch Quote:Usually means folks here do not have experience with the issue--so do not offer a *guess* answer--although I often times will *stick my head out*--gets knocked off frequently
!
Quote:What I mean is, is it better to try and "repair" the source HD in some way, or is a file with bad blocks corrput in any case, and it's better to salvage as much as I can on the destination HD?
It's hard to answer your questions--because it depends on a lot of variables!
As Tator said:
Quote:In my experience once a drive has bad blocks it's likely to develop more bad blocks over time.
and
It's best to save what you can to another drive.
But, how best to do that--using Ghost and cloning--direct cloning or image files? or new HDD transfer software from the manufacturer? or *copy and paste*? All depends on what's working on that old HDD--and if it's dieing!
Quote:I was trying to do a Disk->Disk with Ghost 11.5 and it said my source HD had bad blocks.
and
I told Ghost to continue and ignore future bad blocks
Basically, Ghost warned you that it has encountered *bad blocks* on the source HDD (meaning it can not read the data in those blocks), you told Ghost to ignore them and continue anyway--so Ghost will transfer the *good block* data to the new HDD--but will not transfer the *bad block* data (it's being ignored per your request!)--so any data in those *bad blocks* will be missing from the new destination HDD--but you should now have a *backup* of at least the *good block* data! (If you have selected a *sector-by-sector copy of the source HDD, I think Ghost will still not be able to transfer the *bad block* data--it can't *read* it, so can't transfer it!)
Quote:But is the destination HD likely to be any worse than the source HD?
Assuming Ghost is successful in transferring the *good blocks* (a dieing HDD can be flaky--the Ghost results may also be *flaky*!), I'm guessing your destination HDD should be no worse off than the original source HDD.
Quote:What I mean is, is it better to try and "repair" the source HD in some way, or is a file with bad blocks corrput in any case
I wouldn't try repairs until you have transferred as much of your data as you can (or, at least as much as you care about!) to another HDD--using whatever method makes sense in your situation. Then, you can attempt to use repair techniques to possibly *recover* data in those *bad blocks*.
How to recover data in *bad blocks*? Well, you mentioned *I ran "
chkdsk /r" and it fixed what it could, but there were still some bad blocks...*--that's a first step.
I don't know if Norton Utilities still offers a repair function for NTFS HDDs--used to have a disk utility for FAT based file systems. Perhaps *Disk Keeper* or *Perfect Disk* have recovery/repair functions.
You will see
Gibson Research Corporation's Spinrite product mentioned fairly often.
Here's a Google search on
recover bad sectors.
And, a starting point:
Ask Leo--How do I fix a bad sector on my hard drive?If you can *recover* the data in the *bad blocks*, then you can transfer the recovered data along with all the *good block* data from the source HDD to a destination HDD.