Best HDD Imaging software

Ok, I had a situation recently where a customer hadn't taken a laptop for a service in 6 years, she brought it to me because it was running snail slow and asked me to clean it up. It had .dll errors you'd click on an icon and it would take 5 minutes to highlight etc. I decided to start checking HW.

I couldn't check the drive, chkdsk told me it was unreadable (on numerous occasions using all parameters). It continuously got stuck at 31% on chkdsk /r and wouldn't even start on simple chkdsk. I went looking in Event Logs for any previous results, turns out there was wan for 1 and a half years before, a chkdsk /r was run. The results were 240kbs in Bad Sectors. I started to get worried ...

Up until that point, Norton Ghost hadn't failed me once, I've been using it for 10+ years. I use the latest version, 14. I checked ignore Bad Sectors and checked Smart Sector Scanning and left it. 40% through it gave me an error and wouldn't go any further, again numerous times. Cyclic Redundancy Check. I then started manually backing up all folders to my HDD ... obviously I did 4 at a time because every coupla groups there was one that wouldn't copy because of a corrupt file. I mean the copy process wouldn't even initialize. So I weaned out all the corrupt files using the process of elimation (copying by groups, finding which folder wouldn't copy, going to its subfolders, finding which subfolders wouldn't copy, going to their subfolders etc etc.)

I was doing this in alphabetic order of course. I had 5s remaining to copy the last files in the system32 folder when the HDD shat itself. Basically I'm after HDD Imaging software that will try to recover information from bad sectors, and when it can't, skip them.

Any ideas?

 

Hmmm ... it doesn't bother me about the data ... most of it can be repaired on the new drive anyway ... I'm just after something that will ignore all bad sectors no matter how many there are ...

 

Alright I'll keep it in mind next time I get one of them HDDs. Thanks Halo

 

But did it have only hours to live like the one I worked on did?? lol ... I musta sat there copying files for 11 - 12 hours or something lol ...

 

I've also been using Ghost for years and, for the most part, it's great. But the biggest peeve for me is that it craps out when problems arise. I have used other imaging apps (including many free ones here at MG) and none are nearly as fast as Ghost, but the full paid version of HD Clone (this link is to the free version) is reasonably fast (slower than Ghost, but faster than most others), and when errors occur you can opt to continue copying. For scenarios like Drizzles where manually copying files and folders is needed, I use Unstoppable Copier. It continues to copy regardless of any errors encountered, and you can chose to manually skip faulty files/folders when they're encountered, or you can set the options to skip faulty files and folders automatically. This way it doesn't just error out and you don't have to babysit the copying of 75gb of data....
:-D

 

You got it all in one dlb!!!

That unstoppable copier sound like a good tool ... oh and btw ... even though i got probably 99% of all system files over, even after replacing files and repairing, it won't boot from the system lol. So after all that I have to do a fresh install anyway.

 

Lol I didn't mean it told me I mean it died approx 11 - 12 hours into copying procedure anyway lol ... but if it worked for you, Ill add it to my arsenal of programs and utilities lol.