Several Reallocated Logical Sectors - best to clone or image?

My Toshiba MQ04ABF100 HDD has been horribly slow for a long time now. I've recently started to try and see why, and the HDD is often running at 100% according to Windows Task Manager. It's frustratingly useless half the time.

I've run some tests with CrystalDisk and GSmartControl, and it has several reallocated logical sectors. The first test a week or so back showed about 75, but now it's up to 83. Obviously the drive is starting to fail.

The laptop is an Acer Aspire A515-51-54XM, with 8GB DDR4 RAM, and an i5-8250U processor. Windows 10 Home 1903 (build 18362.592) with all newer updates blocked. There don't seem to be any hardware errors elsewhere (or at least Device Manager isn't showing any warning icons), so I'm assuming the bad sectors are what are crippling the hard drive. (maybe it's trying to check and double-check before writing anything now??)

The only "Windows-type issue" that I've noticed is that sometimes the laptop will just fall asleep. Changing power settings has no effect. This has been happening for several months now, and I've resorted to using LeoMoon Session Guard to keep it awake. For the most part this has 'solved' the problem.

Anyway, I've ordered a SATA WD Blue SSD (1TB) which should arrive this weekend, along with a SATA-USB3.0 cable to connect it with for cloning. I figure hopefully it's just the disk, and if not then at least I'll have an SSD to swap into a new laptop if I need to buy one.

I have lots of software installed on this laptop and really don't want to have to go through reinstalling everything. If a clone/image would be stable then that's probably my preferred option. I'm also not at home where I have my desktop and other external hard drives to work with. I'm abroad and stuck here for a while due to not wanting to travel right now.

I have a couple of questions about how to proceed:
If I clone onto the new SSD, will the bad sectors also get transferred over, thereby showing up as errors on the new drive?
Would those errors, if they do get copied, cause problems later?
From my Googling, I've seen that not all cloning software will deal with bad sectors (Easeus, AOEMI, maybe Clonezilla, will?)
Would it be better to clone the current HDD or to make an image of it? (one of my searches on here mentioned imaging might be better)
Should I not even bother trying to clone/image, but instead attempt a fresh install, despite having to reinstall tons of stuff?
If so, would my current recovery disk work on a new laptop and how would I best do that?

Does anyone have any insights on my best course here? Or maybe there are even other issues I've not thought of?

Thanks for the advice. I'll give it a go with an image and see how it works.

This is the SSD I ordered...
https://www.amazon.com.mx/gp/product...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Prices are high for electronics here in Mexico. I think even more expensive than what I'm used to in Canada. But needs must. I wanted a good size 1 TB and this one looks to fit the bill nicely.

crisps said:

My Toshiba MQ04ABF100 HDD has been horribly slow for a long time now. ... it has several reallocated logical sectors. The first test a week or so back showed about 75, but now it's up to 83. Obviously the drive is starting to fail.

....If I clone onto the new SSD, will the bad sectors also get transferred over, thereby showing up as errors on the new drive?
Would those errors, if they do get copied, cause problems later?...

I had the same problem (only with more reallocated sectors) on one of my machines. If all you have are reallocated sectors then there are no bad sectors to copy over. 'Reallocation' means the drive has successfully recovered the data from a weak sector and written it to a replacement good sector taken from a pool of spare sectors set aside for this purpose. You'd only have problems if the drive's SMART data says that there are any uncorrectable sectors.

I used Macrium to make an image of my drive. It was slow (presumably due to retries for the poor sectors) but completed the image without reporting any bad sectors. By default Macrium will abort making an image if it detects a bad sector. If it completes then you can safely assume that it successfully read all the data. The same would apply if you used Macrium to clone the drive.

When restored to a new drive my system was in perfect working order, yours should be too.

Bree said:

...SMART data showed over 300 reallocated sectors. Now, some 12 hours disk use later, that number has grown to 1,568. The use the disk was being put to was taking a Macrium image of it. I'm treating it to a Samsung 860 Evo as a replacement.

Unusual HDD fault - post #13

I would try running chkdsk /R in an elevated Command prompt, and see what it finds and fixes.

OldNavyGuy said:

I would try running chkdsk /R in an elevated Command prompt, and see what it finds and fixes.

A good idea, as would be SFC /ScanNow. But I would make a clone or an image of the suspect drive first. You want to use the drive as little as possible.

The problem with a failing drive is that any use may make more sectors become 'poor', increasing the Reallocated Sector Count and the pending Sector Count (weak sectors awaiting reallocation). The top priority should be to make a backup of it while you still can.

A Reallocated sector is not the same thing as a bad sector. Reallocation moves the data to a new good sector before the sector becomes unreadable.

Yes, Macrium can be told to back up in the presence of unreadable sectors, but it shouldn't be necessary in this case. If the reallocation has done the job it is designed for then no data has been lost or corrupted (yet).

For my HDD with a steadily increasing Reallocated Sectors Count (number in the thousands) I took no special steps in Macrium. I wanted it to abort if it couldn't read a sector. That fact that it didn't meant that all sectors had been successfully read (some after multiple retries, judging by how long it took) and I could be confident in the image that had been created.

Thanks for the replies thus far everyone.
It's looking more and more like I might have no choice but to do a clean install.

I've made two overnight test attempts to image onto a spare external hdd. Both failed. Using Macrium Reflect Free.
The first night it aborted due to "unable to read from disk - error 23 - data error (cyclical redundancy check)"
Further probing showed it was an ESENT 455 error. So I Googled that, and created the necessary folders in my systemprofile.

Tried again last night and got the same error 23, but no further information in the event viewer.

I'm wondering if there's some error in a partition that isn't being caught when I run chkdsk.

Anyway, my new drive and cable should arrive tomorrow so I'll try one more test tonight to see if I can get Windows to create an image. If that fails, then I guess I'll just swap in the new SSD on the weekend and attempt a fresh install.