I have Windows 10 on my hard drive, where SMART detects many bad sectors. If I buy a new drive and try to clone Windows to it, will that fix the problem? Can I clone hard drives with bad sectors? Does cloning a hard drive copy bad sectors?
Yes, you can clone a hard drive with bad sectors, and cloning a hard drive will not copy the bad sectors.
The bad sectors are a property of the physical components in the drive and will not be copied. In other words, if you clone hard drive A onto hard drive B with ten faulty sectors on A and five bad sectors on B, B will still contain the same five bad sectors as before the cloning procedure.
The hard drive (or any check disk-style function run on the drive) will map those sectors elsewhere so that the cloning software doesn't try to write data to them. However, this has no bearing on the damaged sectors present on the drive and doesn't affect the answer to your query.
The bad sectors will impact the reading and writing of data on a hard disk. If your hard drive has excessive bad sectors, consider replacing the failing hard disk. Cloning is the best technique to safeguard current data before replacing it on a hard drive with damaged sectors.
You must use a professional disk cloning tool to clone a drive with bad sectors. In that case, Qiling Disk Copy comes to help.
Qiling Disk Copy is a valuable cloning tool for Windows 11/10/8/7. If you want to clone a drive with bad sectors, you can use Qiling Disk Copy to clone it sector by sector. It lets you clone a hard drive in Windows 11 and clone your disks, systems, and partitions.
You can clone a hard disk with bad sectors, and cloning a hard drive will not copy bad sectors.
🔗Related Article: How to Fix Bad Sectors on HDD in Windows 10/8/7
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