How to Clone a Drive (HDD/SSD) with Bad Sectors

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The best software to clone disk with bad sectors
How to clone drive with bad sectors in Windows 10

What's the Best Software to Clone Disk with Bad Sectors

"I have a 2TB Seagate drive that is failing with 34% bad sectors. I plan to clone it to a 2TB WD Black hard drive. Yesterday, I tried some cloning software but got 'failure to copy' error in the same way, and then it just stopped the cloning task. Now I really need to find an effective disk cloning software that can clone drive with bad sectors. Any advice shall be greatly appreciated."

Disk cloning software usually works for events when you upgrade hard disk from a smaller one to a larger one, or from an old one to a new one. Cloning operating system, installed programs, files, emails, photos, and other data would largely save you time and energy to reinstall them. But once your old hard drive is diagnosed with bad sectors, most of the time, the cloning procedure will be interrupted immediately. Thus, to find a sturdy disk and partition cloning software that can clone hard drive with bad sectors becomes significantly important.

Qiling Disk Copy, known as the best disk cloning software and partition cloning software in the market, provides unique and powerful cloning features to helps you make a full copy of contents on a disk and move your data, system or apps to another hard drive. When the software detects blank bad sectors from the source disk, it won't terminate the process but work on the bad sectors cloning without interruption.

Tip

When there are logical bad sectors on your disk, you can directly use Qiling Disk Copy to clone hard drive with bad sectors in Windows. However, if there are physical bad sectors, you can only clone disk with bad sectors in WinPE with a bootable disk.

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How to Use Qiling Disk Copy to Clone Hard Drive with Bad Sectors

Qiling Disk Copy provides comprehensive solutions to clone disk with bad sectors in different cases. When there are a few logical bad sectors, and your computer can access the disk, you can run the CHKDSK /F command lines to fix the drive with bad sectors, then clone the damaged hard drive in Windows 10. While if there too many physical bad sectors on the hard drive, neither OS or disk controller can access them nor any type of reading and write operations can be performed; you have to clone the corrupted hard drive in WinPE with a bootable disk.

Now, let's see how to use Qiling Disk Copy to clone disk with bad sectors in simple steps. Before you start, you can do a disk surface test to determine the number of bad sectors.

Get the best disk copy software to clone HDD with bad sectors.

Qiling Disk Copy is fully compatible with Windows 10/8/7. You can just apply this software to help you upgrade and clone all data on the hard drive with bad sectors to a new disk with ease now.

1. How to Clone Disk with Bad Sectors in Windows 10

Remember to connect both the new hard drive and the old drive with bad sectors to your computer as a storage device before starting the disk cloning process.

Step 1. On Qiling Disk Copy, click "Disk/Partition clone" to start cloning.

Step 2. Select the HDD that you want to clone and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the SSD as your destination.

Step 4. Check the disk layout of the destination disks. You can manage the disk layout of the destination disk by draging the left or right border of the partition.

Sector by sector clone: Copy as the source option will copy/clone the same layout of partitions on your source disk to the destination disk.
Edit disk layout allows you to resize or move partition layout on the destination disk manually.
If your destination disk is an SSD drive, do remember to tick "Optimize for SSD" option if the target is SSD.

Step 5: Click "Proceed" to start the hard drive cloning process.

A message now appears, warning you that data will be lost. Please confirm this message by clicking "OK".

After this, you can reset the computer to boot from the system disk, and then you can use the cloned data from the hard drive (HDD/SSD) with bad sectors on the new disk without any problems.

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2. How to Clone Hard Drive with Bad Sectors with Bootable Disk

Step 1. Download, install and run Qiling Disk Copy on a healthy Windows computer. And connect an external storage device like a USB flash drive or and external hard drive to the PC. Click "Create bootable media" in the tool page.

Step 2. Select USB and select your device, click "Proceed".

Wait for the process to complete and then you'll get a bootable disk.

Step 3. Connect the bootable disk USB and a new SSD/HDD to the computer on which you want to clone the disk and set the computer to boot from the bootable disk by changing the boot order in BIOS.

Step 4. On Qiling Disk Copy, click "Disk/Partition clone" to start cloning.

Step 5. Select the source disk that you want to copy or clone. Click "Next" to continue.

Step 6. Select the destination disk where you want to clone/copy the old disk and click Next to continue.

Step 7. Check and edit the disk layout as Autofit the disk, Copy as the source or Edit disk layout. Autofit the disk is recommended. You can manage the disk layout of the destination disk by draging the left or right border of the partition.

Step 8. Click "Proceed" to start the disk cloning or disk copying process now.

Clone Disk with Bad Sectors FAQs

1. Can I clone a drive with bad sectors?

The bad sectors will affect the data reading and writing on a hard drive. When there are too many bad sectors on your hard drive, you can consider replacing the failing hard disk. Cloning a hard drive with bad sectors is the right way to protect existing data before replacing it. Qiling Disk Cloning Software can safely clone sectors of your disk sector, skip the bad areas, and copy the data from the damaged disk to a new drive.

2. Can I clone a corrupt hard drive?

Yes, with Qiling Disk Copy, cloning disk with bad sectors is an easy job.

Step 1. In "Tools" page, select "Disk/Partition clone" to start cloning.

Step 2. Select the corrupt HDD that you want to clone.

Step 3. Select the target hard disk as your destination.

Step 4. Edit the disk layout and then click "Proceed" to continue.

3. How do I fix bad sectors with Qiling?

Qiling Partition Master provides you the Surface Test feature to check for physical bad sectors.

Step 1. Start Qiling Partition Master. Click the disk that you want to check, and then click the "Surface test".

Step 2. The operation will be immediately performed. Bad sectors will be marked as red.

As bad sectors refer to physically bad spots on the hard drive that cause the computer to be unable to read or save data to that spot. If there are too many bad sectors after scanning using Qiling partition manager, there is no software that can repair it; you have to replace a new one.

4. How do you fix bad sectors?

The following steps show how to do logical bad sector repair.

Step 1. Scan disk to find out the bad sector with Qiling Partition Master. Then, carry out the following operations.

Step 2. Data recovery for logical bad sectors.

Step 3. Format the hard disk with Qiling Partition Wizard, Disk Management, or File Explorer.

Step 4. Run SFC to check the bad sectors.