Hard drive is failing, is there a way to copy Windows 10 OS?

CountMike said:

Yeah, band aid at best. If they were soft error bad sectors they wouldn't be relocated. If you manage to back drive up, any damaged files will still be damaged but there would be no repercussions to new system.

If that's the case then I should really get a new hard drive to prevent further problems if my hard drive fails on me sooner than expected. I have to be prepared for the worst since this kind of stuff happened to me and it caught me by surprise and lost all of my data, unfortunately.

Cliff S said:

If the OP is lucky the soft error bad sectors might be repaired with running chkdsk /r in an admin command prompt and rebooting to start it. Then create a system image, and reimage to new disk. Note: your new disk needs to be same size or larger than the system partition(C:) or disk, to reimage to it.

I might just do that to see if it can somehow prevent my hard drive for failing too soon. What are the process to create a system image? Kinda at lost for that part.

EdTittel said:

You can copy all the files you want from the old drive, and then use chkdsk to scan them for errors and attempt repairs. This may result in the loss of some files, but should get most of your stuff across more or less intact. You just don't want to do this with OS files (or important applications) because this could cause runtime trouble further down the road. Hope this makes sense, and that you find this explanation helpful.

--Ed--

Good afternoon Ed! Just a curious question here, what would be the point of using CHKDSK if you are going to lose files. My biggest concern would be to lose very very important files. Now, I did use this CHKDSK on one of my hard drives , But luckily I had my other hard drive that I made back ups before my hard drives got corrupted to see if all my files were there.

Also, any data loss that you incur whether from CHKDSK etc. besides using a data recovery program are there any other methods of getting that data loss back or are the files definitely gone forever?

In my problem, I used easeUS Data Recovery and it seemed to recover my files but not all of them and some of the recovered files are scattered in other folders. So, sorry if I'm repeating, again anything that especially this software did not recover is that lost forever? Are there any other solutions to get the files back that the current software could not get? Or is it basically it's gone except it and move on?


Thank you!

EdTittel said:

Unless you want to try an (expensive) professional data recovery service, those problem or damaged files are more or less unrecoverable. The professionals have expensive tools and software and can sometimes recover things that commercial end-user software cannot. But it will costs hundreds to thousands of dollars to do, so you must decide if those files are worth the outlay. For some people they are (which is how those companies stay in business). Up to you!
HTH,
--Ed--

PS: I've got a friend/co-author who's a professional forensics expert. If you want, I can ask him to recommend best/most reliable commercial recovery services (Neil Broom Technical Resource Center https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilbroom).

Thank you very much Ed for your response, explanation and clarification. It helped! I understand now. Thank you for the recommendation. At this point in time, I won't do commercial services. I am still not sure what files I have lost, if any. I have to go through them still.

EdTittel said:

May your file adventures come to a happy conclusion, with nothing of importance lost in the wash! Best wishes,
--Ed--

Thank you Ed! I appreciate your input thank you for doing that. You have a great wonderful day.