How to make backup image of hard disk having bad sectors

cereberus said:

The problem is no imaging tool can reliably backup data if source has bad sectors.

If those bad sectors contain critical OS data, the backup image may not work.

If bad sectors are in critical OS data, then OS should not work even now but presently it is running without any problem.

Then you are correct run chkdsk to temp fix you're the hard drive, then you can try to the run image backup. I have done this in the past with some success and some failure it's really a matter of how fast your sectors are failing.

PS all my OS drives are now SSD and I don't worry about such things as hard drive failures.

Please confirm the one thing which I noticed in ver 7 free that there is a option in Macrium installed in PC to ignore bad sectors while imaging but this option is not there in rescue media. Am I missing some thing?

There are special setting in MR to do this if you dont use the correct settings the bad blocks will be written to the new disk

Techie Tuesday: Imaging disks with bad sectors – Macrium Software

Samuria said:

There are special setting in MR to do this if you dont use the correct settings the bad blocks will be written to the new disk

Techie Tuesday: Imaging disks with bad sectors – Macrium Software

You did not understand my query. I know there are settings in MR to ignore bad sectors but I am not finding this setting in Rescue USB wherein this setting is available in MR which is installed in PC.

One more thing. I was creating image of my system partition (c) and the destination was partition (d) when it stopped at 80 %. Now how do I know whether bad clusters are in partition (c) or partition (d).

dalchina said:

I hope you're not trying to create an image of a partition and save the image to the same drive. If so, and the drive is faulty, that's a seriously bad idea. Even with a good drive, it's not a good idea, since the image would be useless should the drive fail.

I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve- the best you could aim for would be a forensic image of your faulty drive/partitions saved to a good drive, and then use that as a source to copy what you can that's still sound. However what I don't know is this: would the saved data be entirely readable without CRC errors indicating problems, so you would lose any ability to detect whether a particular file was corrupt on the basis of the file system, or not, never having been forced to have to attempt this.

v5: Imaging disks with bad sectors (Bad Sectors)


Note the forensic image includes free space too.


The guide says it's a full copy...implying the option should be there. I can't say personally without booting from it myself.

http://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v...df?src=sidebar

I always save image to other hard disk but in this present scenerio, I am saving on same hard disk but on other partition. The data is not important so I am playing with MR. And when I was playing, I had to cancel the image creation when it stopped at 80% and I saw that 217 bad clusters are there. I could not note down whether MR indicated partition c or d. So I asked, if anyone knows MR was indicating bad sectors in c or d. Tomorrow I will first run chkdsk and then create image.