Will Ghost also copy bad sectors?

[Shawn E. Hale]

Running XP Pro.
I recently had a bad sector show up on my hard drive (WD 120 gig). I was
thinking about using Symantec Ghost to make a copy of my drive, installing a
new hard drive, and then "Ghosting" back my data onto the new drive. I
noticed when the bad sector was originally found, there was a message saying
that the bad sector was marked and included in the "bad sector list" which
made me wonder if that list would also be copied and moved on to the new
hard drive therefore marking a sector bad on the new hard drive. Would this
happen or would the bad sector get left behind? Thanks.

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

Hey Shawn,

If you do a physical copy, the most cloning utilities copy sector by sector,
so yes, bad sectors would be included, and also any unpartitioned space, it
litterally copies everything. I believe Ghost calls this a sector copy.

If you do a logical copy, then the file system structure is used to get the
informations so it wouldn't copy bad sectors, Ghost, I think, calls this a
native copy.

Paul

 

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

Drive Image will only copy sectors that contain information, if you tell it
to do so. This is switched ON, by default. It will NOT copy defective
sectors. I have proven this to myself many times!

 

[Shawn E. Hale]

There is a happy ending to this story. Ghost does not have the capability
to skip bad sectors on an NTFS file system and will stop restoring when it
encounters a bad sector. (The command line switch to do this is for FAT
file systems only). So I had the hard drive replaced with one that was the
same size as the imaged (bad) one. "Ghosted" the image back onto the new
hard drive and XP Pro rebooted with no problems or activation issues.