Best Software to Clone Hard Drives with Bad Sectors (Bootable)

What are the bad sectors, What are the effects?

A bad sector on a hard drive is a tiny cluster of storage space of the hard drive that appears to be defective. The bad sectors won’t respond to read or write requests, which may affect the use of your computer and even cause data loss.

Bad sectors usually occur because of:

• Physical damage to the disk
• Wear and tear over time
• Power surges or unexpected shutdowns
• Manufacturing defects

There are also 2 types of bad sectors on hard drives - hard bad sectors and soft bad sectors.

🌚Hard bad sectors: Hard bad sectors refer to physical defects on the hard drive that cause the computer to be unable to read or save data (and cannot be repaired). They are caused by manufacturing flaws or wear problems that contribute to the sector’s physical destruction.

🌓Soft bad sectors: Soft bad sectors are logical defects caused by software issues or power supply problems to your drive. Unforeseen system issues and malware have been known to also cause bad sectors to develop.

When cloning a hard drive with bad sectors, the process may stop due to unreadable data, leading to "read error" messages. Another concern is that the bad sectors may get cloned to the new disk during cloning. To resolve this, you can either attempt to fix the bad sectors first or use software that can skip over the faulty areas during the cloning process. This ensures that cloning can proceed successfully without duplicating the damaged sectors.

• Best software to clone hard drive with bad sectors
• Step-by-step guide: clone HDD with bad sectors in Windows
• How to check and fix bad sectors on hard drive (2 ways)
• FAQs about cloning hard drive with bad sectors

Best software to clone hard drive with bad sectors

To clone hard disks with bad sectors, the first thing you need is an efficient tool. Many programs on the internet will not be able to handle or read the bad sectors and they will simply abort the cloning process when they reach bad sectors – but AOMEI Backupper Professional, this specialist hard drive cloning program can copy only used sectors, and skip all the blank and logically bad sectors.

✔ Compatible with all Windows operating systems, including Windows 11, 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, and XP.
✔ Allows you to clone large disk to smaller disk (or vice versa), as long as the data fits onto the smaller drive.
✔ By default, it uses an intelligent-sector clone, copying only the occupied sectors and skipping over bad ones during the process.
✔ Its powerful cloning features enable you to clone HDD to SSD, regardless of the brand, without the need to reinstall your operating system. It also supports clone hard drives to external drives.

AOMEI Backupper’s clean user interface makes it easy to use. Even a rookie user can complete complex-level cloning operations at the push of a button. Why not download it right now to solve your cloning problems?

*The cloning features in the trial version are for demonstration only. To actually complete the cloning, you can upgrade AOMEI Backupper for full functionality.

Step-by-step guide: clone HDD with bad sectors in Windows

First, connect to the new drive you want use to on your PC (either an SSD, a newer HDD, or an external HDD).

📢Important: If you are copying a failing hard drive and your computer cannot boot up already due to the bad sectors, please create a bootable USB on a working Windows-based PC using AOMEI Backupper. Next, boot the computer that contains the broken drive using the bootable USB. AOMEI Backupper will load once the system has booted.

Step 1. Install and launch hard drive cloning software AOMEI Backupper Professional. Next, click on Clone and then select Disk Clone. *If you want to clone Only OS, you can use the System Clone feature.

Step 2. Select the hard drive with bad sectors as the source disk.

Step 3. Select another drive as the destination disk. It's ok to clone a larger drive to a smaller drive or vice versa.

✍Note: The Professional edition supports cloning both data disks and systems disks from MBR to MBR/MBR to GPT, or GPT to GPT/GPT to MBR. If you only want to clone data disks, you can pick the complete free Standard edition.

Step 4. Check the operation summary and click Start Clone.

🔲Related tips:

👉 If you copy data from a hard disk with bad sectors to an SSD, then checking the SSD Alignment option will greatly improve the read and write speed of the drive as well as prolong its service life.

👉 You can make all of the partitions on the bad disk fill the entire second disk by clicking on Edit Partitions.

• Copy without altering partition sizes: Keeps the partition sizes unchanged during the cloning process.
• Allocate extra space to all partitions: Distribute any unallocated space evenly across all partitions on the target disk.
• Adjust partition size manually: This allows you to allocate unused space to any partition you prefer on the destination drive.
• Convert MBR to GPT: Automatically converts the target disk’s partition style if it's different from the source disk, ensuring compatibility.

👉 It is advised you UNCHECK the Sector By Sector Clone box as it will take considerably longer to clone the drive and it is possible the bad sectors will be copied.

Here's a video that describes the feature more clearly：

Step 5. When the clone is complete, shut down the computer and replace the broken hard drive that contains the bad sectors with the newly cloned drive (if you are using a laptop with only one slot), and then boot from it.

If your computer has extra slot, you can also keep the old hard drive, and change boot order in the BIOS (press specified key during startup to enter this menu) on your desktop PC to boot from the newly cloned drive.

This method is suitable for all kinds of hard drives, such as SATA drives and NVMe SSDs, you can use it to clone SATA to NVMe, clone NVMe to another NVMe, etc.

AOMEI Backupper is also a M.2 SSD cloner. You can use it to clone HDD to M.2 SSD, clone M.2 SSD to M.2 SSD, etc.

How to check and fix bad sectors on hard drive (2 ways)

Before cloning a disk with bad sectors, some users may want to try fixing the existing issues first. In fact, once there's something wrong with your hard drive, you have some ways to check the hard drive for errors and hopefully, get the bad sectors fixed. Here are 2 ways you can try.

🔲Tips:

• Please be aware that the data that has been written to the bad sectors is difficult to recover.
• And if bad sectors appear on your hard drive, it's nearly impossible to fix it by your own. You may need to send it to the manufacturer or a repair center

Way 1. Use error-checking tool

Open “This PC”, right-click on the system drive, choose “Properties” -> “Tools”, and click “Check now” under Error checking. Then, click “Scan drive” on the pop-up window.

If errors are found, you can decide if you want to fix them.

Way 2. Run chkdsk command

1. Type "command prompt" in the Windows Search pane, and run it as administrator to open an elevated Command Prompt window.

2. When prompted, type "chkdsk x: /f /r" (replace "x" with the drive you want to scan for) and press the 'Enter' key, the tool will now find any bad sectors and attempt to repair them.

Note: the data may be permanently lost if the bad sectors can’t be recovered.

Nevertheless, it would be time-consuming if there are plenty of bad sectors on the drive, and there's no guarantee for the result. Therefore, compared to reparing a failing hard drive, it may be a better idea to clone the hard drive with bad sectors to a good one to avoid further loss.

FAQs about cloning hard drive with bad sectors

1. Should I repair bad sectors before cloning a hard drive?

If possible, repairing bad sectors before cloning can improve the chances of successful data migration. However, if the drive is too damaged, it’s often best to clone it directly without attempting repairs, as this could cause further degradation.

2. What are some other ways to recover data from a failing hard disk?

You can also use recovery software that can scan the crashed or inaccessible hard disk and recover the files;

Another way is to extract the hard drive from the dead computer and connect it to another working computer as an external drive, then copy the data if it is accessible;

If you've made backups (using Windows Backup or other tools) before the hard drive fails, you can restore some important data from the backup. If you haven't, well, maybe it's time to get into the habit of scheduled backups.

3. How to deal with the source hard drive with bad sectors after cloning?

When you finish cloning, you can boot the system from the new disk, but what about the old failing hard drive?

Actually, if it's soft bad sectors, then you can still try wiping the hard drive for reuse. Just keep it connected to your computer as an external drive, launch AOMEI Backupper, and go to Tools -> Disk Wipe. Then you can choose to Wipe disk with 4 wiping methods available (Fill sectors with Zero, Fill sectors with random data, DoD 52220.22-M, Gutmann). This will delete all partitions and wipe all sectors on the disk.

Tech Terms Explained:

Sector-by-Sector Cloning: A cloning process where each sector of the source disk is copied exactly, including bad sectors, ensuring that every part of the disk is replicated.

Bad Sectors: Physical or logical defects on a hard drive that prevent the operating system from reading or writing data to those particular sections of the disk.

Disk Imaging: The process of creating a full backup of a disk, including all files, partitions, and system settings, which can be used to restore a system in case of failure.

Tips for Successful Hard Drive Cloning

1. Use Quality Cloning Software: Always rely on trusted cloning tools like AOMEI Backupper or Macrium Reflect for handling bad sectors during the cloning process.

2. Backup Important Data First: Before cloning a failing hard drive, it's always advisable to back up critical files separately, just in case the cloning process encounters issues.

3. Check Drive Health Regularly: Regularly monitor the health of your drives using utilities like SMART Diagnostics to catch bad sectors early and avoid data loss.

Summary

You shouldn’t worry about bad sectors affecting your disk as you can fix them by cloning the drive with AOMEI Backupper or by using the ‘chkdsk’ function built into Windows. AOMEI Backupper has many other specialist features, like system backup, automatic SSD backup, incremental and differential backups, and many many more.

If you are an advanced PC user and you would prefer to clone hard drives using the command prompt, AOMEI Backupper Professional Edition is designed for you. AOMEI Backupper Standard/Professional Editions don’t support Windows Server operating systems, so if you’re running a Windows Server 2003, 2008, 2012, 2016, or 2019 operating system please check out our other specialist tool: AOMEI Backupper Server Edition.