How do I identify corrupt files after cloning a faulty drive?

Hi everyone,

The 500 GB hard drive on my laptop was weakening, it had about 120 bad sectors, so I set out to clone it to a new one.

I created an image of it with ddrescue, then restored the image to a larger 1 TB drive.

Out of the 500 GB drive, 600 KB could not be retrieved by ddrescue.

After restoring the image, I booted on the Windows Seven Repair Disk and ran a "CHKDSK E: /B" on the Windows partition. I didn't notice it saying anything special.

Then I opened a Windows 7 session and ran "sfc /VERIFYONLY", which said it "did not find any integrity violations". From that, can I conclude that all system files are okay? Does SFC check everything?

Then I ran a CHKDSK /B on the data partition, that talked about recovering 12 orphaned files in a folder that had created instability prior to cloning. I then tried to duplicate and open those files, which seemed to work.

What about the rest? How do I go about checking whether all my program and data files are devoid of corruption? Would simply trying to copy them do the trick, would it tell me it can't read them of something? Or is there another method? I have a ddrescue mapfile, but the methods I saw based on that seemed quite complicated... So that will be a last resort!

Thank you! :)

How did you clone it? If you clone a faulty drive it will write all the bad sectors to the new drive some clone software has special settings to not clone bad sectors but it has to be implemented

I used GNU ddrescue from an Ubuntu live CD. It does a sector to sector copy, and is supposed to be the best tool to create an image that is as complete as possible when you're dealing with a failing drive. It's mostly used for data recovery from the image, but you can also choose to restore the image to a new hard drive, which is what I did.

This is a tricky subject, isn't it... Would anyone have answers on this part, at least?

Gi1919 said:

Then I opened a Windows 7 session and ran "sfc /VERIFYONLY", which said it "did not find any integrity violations". From that, can I conclude that all system files are okay? Does SFC check everything?