How to Clone Hard Drive with Bad Sectors And Boot Successfully

“Can you clone hard drive with bad sectors?”

Hi, my laptop HDD is failing, and I use chkdsk to check it, and it reported bad sectors. It is still operational but is showing increasing errors trying to read files, so I know it is time to change the HDD. I have tried some software to clone the HDD, but they cannot clone hard drive with bad sectors. Is there a way to clone HDD with bad sectors?"

- Question from Sevenforums.com

When you replace hard drive with SSD, you may try to use cloning software to clone the hard drive to save your time from reinstalling lots of applications, and transferring many photos, videos, files. However, if there are bad sectors on your hard drive, the ordinary clone software is unable to read the bad sectors on the hard drive, which can lead to a halt or interruption during the cloning process.

Thus, it is necessary to find a powerful hard disk cloner that can clone all sectors, including clone disk with bad sectors on your hard drive to another drive.

The best software to copy hard drive with bad sectors

To clone bad sectors of your hard drive, you can turn to the best cloning software-AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional Edition, whose "sector-by-sector clone" feature can clone HDD with bad sectors or clone SSD with bad sectors to another disk even when the source disk develops some bad sectors. And it has lots of benefits as below:

- It is compatible with the most popular Windows operating systems. Whether your operating system is Windows 11/10/8/7, Vista, or XP, it can clone hard disk with bad sectors successfully.
- It supports aligning partition after clone to improve the read/write speed of the hard drive, and prolong its lifespan.
- Easy-to-use. Compared with other complex cloning tools, even a computer beginner can follow its onscreen instructions to clone a hard disk.
- Your computer can be booted from the destination disk after cloning the system disk. You just need to enter BIOS to set it as the prior boot device.

How to clone hard drive with bad sectors

 Now, connect a new hard drive to your computer. And you can download the Demo Version of AOMEI Partition Assistant to have a try. 

Step 1. Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant. Click “Clone” in the main interface, and choose “Clone Disk”.

Step 2. In this window, choose the “Sector-by-Sector Clone” method to clone HDD or SSD with bad sectors. And click “Next”.

✍ Tip: “Clone Disk Quickly”, only clone used space and does not copy bad sectors, allows you to clone a larger drive to a smaller drive as long as your newer hard drive has enough space to contain all the data on the old hard drive.

Step 3. Select the disk that has bad sectors as the source disk, and click “Next”.

Step 4. Then choose the new hard drive as the destination disk, and the software would note you the destination disk will be wiped out. Click “Yes” and “Next”.

Step 5. And read the system about boot problems after cloning. If you encounter a boot issue, you can try to exchange the sockets of the destination disk and source disk.

Step 6. In the main interface, click “Apply” and “Proceed” to execute cloning hard drive with bad sectors.

When the process is over, you can use the new hard drive to replace the old hard drive. If you keep both drives on your computer, you probably need to enter BIOS Settings to change boot drive.

◇ Set the new drive as the first boot drive

Step 1. Restart the computer, when you see the first screen, press the functional key (F2, F3, F4, F5, ESC) to enter "BIOS Setup".

Step 2. Select "Change boot order", and change the cloned hard drive to the top of the listed drives.

Step 3. Press “F10” to save and leave.

✍ Note: If the cloned hard drive won't boot, you can check if the boot mode (BIOS and UEFI) and the connection boot are correct.

Conclusion

I believe you've known how to clone hard drives with bad sectors with AOMEI Partition Assistant. It is more than a hard drive cloner, it can also help you to remove bad sectors from the hard disk permanently after cloning. And if you encounter a boot problem one day, you can use it to create a bootable USB to repair it.

In addition, there is the AOMEI Partition Assistant Server Edition that is specialized for Windows Server systems, if your computer runs Server OS, try this one instead.