I have a bad seagate hard drive on my dell computer [smart drive said bad] [and i ran utilities on it and it said it had too many bad sectors to fix ..then i ran another program and it fixed 2,000 bad sectors. I was able to boot up with it in another computer and get in through safe mode. I then copied the files using acronis. yeah!

I have a new hard drive so I put that in and [these are sata drives] started cloning using acronis .
It says it is copying sector by sector. However, twice it could not copy a sector and i pressed ignore......... it is continuing and says it has 5 hours to go.

My questions are:
1. Will it work if i skipped those sectors? or am i just wasting my time?
2. is there a better way to copy the HD?
3. It did not come with recovery disks ..it has a recovery partition...is there a way I could use that to recover to the new hard drive.
4 and is the hard drive still bad if the utility really did recover the 2,000 bad sectors?
thanks in advance
Jan

Hello Cyberjan,

The clone may or may not work. It depends on what the data was that you skipped. If it is just a bad sector with a picture on it or some temp file, then it'll be fine. If the bad sectors are where important Windows files are located, then you can have problems.

As far as a different way to do it would be to attach the hard drive to another computer and just save your important files to DVD on the other computer. Then when you install the new hard drive, just do a fresh install of Windows and copy the important data from the DVDs to the new hard drive. If you don't have the recovery disks, you can order them for cheap from the manufacturer.

If you can clone the recovery partition to the new drive by itself, you can use Acronis to set it as the active partition. When it is set as the active partition, it will actually boot to the recovery manager. Once it recovers the system, it should set the partiions and drive letters the way they are supposed to be and boot normally. I've done it a few times.

To answer your last question, yes, the hard drive is still bad. SMART failures mean the hard drive is not operating according to the factory specs. It isn't spinning at the right speed, it may not be accessing, reading, writing at the right speed, and there could be mechanics failures. Bad sectors are another problem in itself. So I'd say that drive doesn't have much longer until it is completely worthless.

Hope that helps!

Thanks Wadd!
It did work!
I cloned the HD, in another computer, i could not test it because MS would not let me log in until I went through the MS approval. [what a pain] So i put the new HD back into the original computer and it went in fine xp worked great. I ran a chkdsk /r and it quickly ran through fixing a ton of sectors and other things like indexes. After it finished everything seemed OK !
Also the old bad hard drive booted up several times and seemed to work fine too....however, I am just going to keep it as a back up to the back up.
Dell did send a set of disks for free...and said they would walk me through it over the phone for $40 ...not!