Probably a stupid question

[vonbismarck]

Hello all. My hard drive is bad, just as others said it would be. I am in the process of getting a new hard drive to replace it. Lets say that the old drive is is no longer working because of bad sectors, if I clone it onto the new drive would it:

a) work fine

b) corrupt that drive too?

Thank you all.

[tivoupgrade]

Hello all. My hard drive is bad, just as others said it would be. I am in the process of getting a new hard drive to replace it. Lets say that the old drive is is no longer working because of bad sectors, if I clone it onto the new drive would it:

a) work fine

b) corrupt that drive too?

Thank you all.

The answer to both questions is MAYBE.

It really depends on the extent of the damage. Some folks have successfully used tools like spinrite to repair their drives. Others have used dd_rescue to copy one drive to a new one and successfully repaired the errors. And, its possible that neither will work at all.

There is really no way to tell without trying it but in my experience, you have a better chance of not succeeding than succeeding (that is based upon a high percentage of unsuccessful attempts at recovering drives using dd_rescue; I've not tried spinrite many times as it can be extremely time consuming).

Its definitely not a stupid question, but because there are a lot of variables associated with the issue, there is really no definitive answer.

[vonbismarck]

The answer to both questions is MAYBE.

It really depends on the extent of the damage. Some folks have successfully used tools like spinrite to repair their drives. Others have used dd_rescue to copy one drive to a new one and successfully repaired the errors. And, its possible that neither will work at all.

There is really no way to tell without trying it but in my experience, you have a better chance of not succeeding than succeeding (that is based upon a high percentage of unsuccessful attempts at recovering drives using dd_rescue; I've not tried spinrite many times as it can be extremely time consuming).

Its definitely not a stupid question, but because there are a lot of variables associated with the issue, there is really no definitive answer.
Thank you for the reply. Here is the part that is/was probably stupid, lets say that I clone the drive and after I place the new drive in, it still says corrupted. Could I pull the drive, reformat and just use a new image? Would the drive work like normal or would it still be corrupted from before?

Thank you.

[John T Smith]

As far as I know LOGICAL errors (the image from a bad drive says sector X is bad, but it really is not, it is just the section in the image that is bad) have nothing to do with PHYSICAL errors

In other words, the image marks sector X as bad... but the physical space on the new hard drive is not really bad and may be fixed

[vonbismarck]

As far as I know LOGICAL errors (the image from a bad drive says sector X is bad, but it really is not, it is just the section in the image that is bad) have nothing to do with PHYSICAL errors

In other words, the image marks sector X as bad... but the physical space on the new hard drive is not really bad and may be fixed
Thank you. I was thinking that but wanted to be sure as I don't really have the money to buy another hard drive but want to try and receive all the shows I hadn't be able to see yet.