Bad blocks on Toshiba HDD & Win10 OS probs

You could use Macrium Reflect to make backup and if it verifies than you can just restore image to new drive and it will be just as good as cloning if not better. MR rescue disk/USB contains programs for dealing with bad BOOT and other problems and can also optimize for SSD if you use it.

ohante said:

They mention ddrescue in that 7 thread.. Folks over at hddguru suggested starting with either that or hddsuperclone to do an identical sector by sector clone for drives that exhibit evidence of hardware failure. I've just finished 2 & 1/2 hours of cloning the notebook's internal HDD minus all it's bad blocks to the new drive connected to the notebook via this Sabrent docking station, with the notebook booted into Linux Mint off an USB stick. So far so good.

Tomorrow I'll see if I can pull the Toshiba case apart, swap drives, run the Windows 10 installer from a flash drive, select the Repair option and see if the installer can repair the cloned copy of 10.

Someone also reminded me that Toshibas have a keyboard shortcut that can restore the notebook to its factory fresh software condition using system recovery I think from a hidden partition.

http://support.toshiba.com/sscontent?docId=98082971

That may be another option if the W10 installer can't repair the HDD clone.

Data recovery I've dealt with a bit in the past using various software. The "magical' one was Testdisk that was able to recover a deleted NTFS partition table from a backup few seem to be aware exists at the very end of the drive. I'd mistakenly deleted the drive's one primary partition with the wrong diskpart command. But after hours of deep scanning, Testdisk fixed the useless drive in a second by copying the backup table back to the beginning of the drive.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

It's all fixed :)
@Samuria - Other methods of cloning corrupted HDDs might not have been successful, but the Linux hddsuperclone folks on hddguru suggested did the trick. Last night I booted the Toshiba to Linux Mint from a flash drive, and ran hddsuperclone to clone the internal HDD to a new one in a USB connected docking station. Tonight I cracked the case open and dropped in the clone. After that it was pretty simple. Booted Windows 10, and ran Check Now from the C: drive's Properties > Tools menu. It had me reboot to run chkdsk I assume it was, found and fixed system file errors, and finally booted to a working desktop after repairs.

I'm glad it was that quick and easy. But now I still don't know if my old Acronis True Image backups could have been restored successfully. I am tempted though to delete hundreds of gigabytes worth of backed up video & audio files and run Acronis to image the new drive. And maybe look the free Macrium Reflect program @CountMike mentioned for imaging.

ohante said:

It's all fixed :)
@Samuria - Other methods of cloning corrupted HDDs might not have been successful, but the Linux hddsuperclone folks on hddguru suggested did the trick. Last night I booted the Toshiba to Linux Mint from a flash drive, and ran hddsuperclone to clone the internal HDD to a new one in a USB connected docking station. Tonight I cracked the case open and dropped in the clone. After that it was pretty simple. Booted Windows 10, and ran Check Now from the C: drive's Properties > Tools menu. It had me reboot to run chkdsk I assume it was, found and fixed system file errors, and finally booted to a working desktop after repairs.

I'm glad it was that quick and easy. But now I still don't know if my old Acronis True Image backups could have been restored successfully. I am tempted though to delete hundreds of gigabytes worth of backed up video & audio files and run Acronis to image the new drive. And maybe look the free Macrium Reflect program @CountMike mentioned for imaging.

That's great news! I'll second the Macrium recommendation. Cheers!

ohante said:

Indeed @simrick - I want to thank you and everyone who took some time to contribute their thoughts on this issue. I learned a lot along the way. It's really great that support forums like these are still chocked full of knowledgeable folks willing to help work out other peoples' issues... just like the pre-www gui days.

Happy to have my lappy no longer so wacky.

Cheers all!

Glad we could be of help.

Fantastic @zbook. Those commands seem to have done the trick:

/checkhealth - Found no corruption
/scanhealth - Completed successfully
/restorehealth - Completed successfully

Re-ran sfc /scannow which reported corrupt files found and successfully repaired - this time with no mention of any corrupt files found that couldn't be repaired.

Thanks ever so much for your input on this bit of digital magic @zbook. :)