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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?