Is it possible to image from a damaged HDD?

publius71 · 04 Sep 2015

I've been getting indications that my HDD was failing, seeing disk errors in the event log, etc. The other day, I performed a windows update and in the middle got the following message:

One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency....blah...Cannot open volume for direct access. Autochk cannot run due to an error caused by a recently installed package. Use the system restore feature...blah. An unspecified error occurred (766f6c756d652e63 3f1)

I tried repairing windows with the factory disk, no luck. It said I had no restore points. Strange because I saw WU create one minutes earlier.

Anyway, I had no back up protection. I've since purchased a replacement (hybrid) drive and a backup drive along with a USB HD dock. I've been able to browse my files on the bad disk and transfer most to a flash drive. Some cannot be copied/moved/accessed.

My question is this; can I use Acronis or another program to image the damaged disk? Would I want to? What do you suggest I do to restore the old drive to the new drive as best I can? Any partition suggestions?

Lady Fitzgerald · 04 Sep 2015

It's doubtful that you can but, even if you could, you wouldn't want to since all an image would do is replicate the errors on the failing drive.

However, you have taken a step in the right direction but not just getting a replacement drive, but also getting a backup drive. I would suggest getting a second backup drive and keep it offsite somewhere since even a backup drive can fail. Just make sure to update the offsite backup as often as possible. An alternative to a physical offsite drive is a good paid cloud backup service (stay away from free cloud storage), such as Carbonite.com. A basic personal plan only runs $60/year.

mjf · 04 Sep 2015

You can try Macrium Reflect with the following setting
Imaging disks with bad sectors - KnowledgeBase - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

LittleSomething · 07 Sep 2015

First, you need to copy your important files to another place, to avoid data lost.
To replace the hard drive, you can use backup/clone/image application to create an image and recover to new drive. Or you can clone the old drive to new drive.
In both way, you'd better do it with 'sector by sector' option.