Hi,

a friends 4 year old dell dimension 5000 has a failing C: drive.

bad sectors are being reported in the system event log , and the system is freezing for several minutes from time to time.

I had a look and attached an external USB 300 Gb drive and copied off all the folders she wanted.

I then installed Norton Ghost and tried to backup the entire C: drive. First time through it failed , as it errored on some bad sectors. I set the radio box to ignore bad blocks and have left it running. Think it's USB 1.0 so likely to take a while. Only 20Gb of the 160Gb disk is being used.


My Question concerns the best way forward.

The 2 options as I see it are :

1) Install a new disk drive, reinstall from OEM recovery disk (assuming we can find it) and reinstall ALL previous apps, upgrades and files. Painful and time consuming, and hard to get the system back to how itb was before.


2) Install a new disk alongside the existing C: drive. Disk image old to new (inc. MBR) and reboot. I have done this before with Norton Ghost and it worked fine.

I guess my concern is that I also image corrupted files across. When I did this some time ago it was from a Seagate drive. Seagates tools are great, they not only report bad blocks BUT the files that are sitting on the bad bocks. That way you can figure out if the corrupted files are important or not, or wether you can copy them from an existing good system.

Alas most other drive tools appear not to have this ability. In this case the drive is a western Digital.

My current thinking is to :

1) chkdsk /f/r the drive

2) Install a new drive on the slave of the IDE

3) boot and image the first disk to the second using Ghost

4) shutdown and swap the disk positions and reboot off the new copy


Is there a tool that will let me see which files are affected by the current bad blocks ?

Any view on what the best practice is for this (fairly comon ?) situation

Thanks

One approach is try your second option first and if it is unsatisfactory then try the Clean install.

From all my searching I see no one that suggests cloning or mirroring a drive with bad blocks.

I did find this possible method:

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=142608

As to viewing the contents of the bad blocks I see nothing in this area.