Guide - How to Clone a Bad Hard Drive to Avoid Data Loss - MiniTool

Can a bad hard drive be cloned? How do I copy from a bad sector hard drive? If you have a hard drive with bad sectors, you can shield bad sectors and then run MiniTool software to easily clone hard drive before replacing it. Let’s see the guide to know how to clone a bad hard drive.

As a data storage center, a hard drive plays an important role in the computer. If it goes wrong, the machine may crash.

When you are working or playing on the PC, you may receive some signals to indicate that the hard drive may be failing. For example, the hard drive has a beeping sound, you get a SMART hard drive error like SMART Failure Predicted on Hard Disk or SMART hard disk error 301, etc. Sometimes if you perform a disk test, some bad sectors may be detected.

Related article: Here Are 6 Signs Indicating Hard Drive Failure, Check out Now

Bad sectors mean the disk sectors on a disk storage unit are damaged permanently. Once the hard drive is failing with bad sectors, the necessary thing is to back up the data in time.

Can I Clone a Hard Drive with Bad Sectors

One common way is cloning a bad hard drive to another good hard drive to avoid data loss. Then, a question comes: can a bad hard drive be cloned or can you clone a hard drive that has bad sectors? Of course, you can do this thing.

The important thing is to use professional and reliable hard drive cloning software. According to some users, they run some software to clone a bad hard drive but get the failure to copy error and the program stops cloning.

How to Clone Drive with Bad Sectors

How to clone hard drive before replacing it? To easily and successfully clone a drive that has bad sectors, here we recommend using MiniTool software – MiniTool ShadowMaker. It is a piece of free backup software and also hard drive cloning software.

With its Clone Disk, you can transfer all the contents including your data, system, and apps from a hard drive to another hard disk to prevent data loss. When the software finds bad sectors, it won’t stop working but continue the cloning process.

To successfully do this thing, you had better first shield bad areas on the target hard disk. Just run Command Prompt with admin rights and execute the command – chkdsk e:/f /r. E refers to the drive letter of the target drive.

Next, start to clone a failing hard drive with bad sectors by following the steps below.

Step 1: Download and install MiniTool ShadowMaker on your PC.

Step 2: Launch this software to its main interface.

Step 3: Go to the Tools tab and click Clone Disk.

Step 4: Choose the source drive and target drive, then start the cloning process.

In addition to disk cloning, you can back up data to another safe location via the Backup feature of MiniTool ShadowMaker. Just move to the corresponding tab, choose the backup source & target, and start the backup task.

Besides, another MiniTool software – MiniTool Partition Wizard can be also used to help you clone a bad hard drive with its Copy Disk or Migrate OS to SSD/HD Wizard. If you need to deal with a system disk, a paid edition is required.

To know more information on how to clone a drive with bad sectors with MiniTool software, you can refer to our previous post – What to Do If I Find Bad Sectors on Hard Drive in Windows 11/10/8/7.

Final Words

Bad sectors have a bad influence on disk reading & writing. If many bad sectors are found on your hard drive, you had better clone it to another disk and replace the failing one. Just shield bad sectors and get MiniTool ShadowMaker to start the cloning.

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