Dying Hard drive - Is ghost an option??

Hello,

I have a dying hard drive on a re-conditioned server located in a co-location facility. The box is M$ XP-Pro. The error I'm getting is:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7
Date: 9/13/2006
Time: 9:50:48 AM
User: N/A
Computer: P0077
Description:
The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block.

Can you ghost (successfully) an old drive to a new drive, even if the old drive has a bad block?

Thanks

 

I'd first run chkdsk /r on the disk. If it has any bad sectors they should get marked as such. Then do the ghost thing. I don't know if ghost (or whatever imaging program you're using) will ignore the bad sectors but it can't hurt to try it.

 

I would try to mark the bad sectors as well. I have had Ghost crash when there were more than the odd one or two bad sectors. If you find there are any problems using Chkdsk and you happen to have Norton SystemWorks, Disk Doctor in Norton Utilities can also mark bad sectors (and you can boot to the CD if you cannot get into Windows).

Matt

 

Here's a follow-up to my issue.

The drive with a problem happeded to be a Seagate drive. I downloaded and created the seatools diagnostic disk. The full-system test yield (7) bad blocks.

Using the seatools, I then tried to fix these bad blocks, but each time, the "Live" system kept locking up. made no difference if I selected fix all or fix selected. So basically the seatools was only helpful in identifying my problem.

Having done some parallel googling, I came across some ghost threads when dealing with bad blocks...and using additional switches. So I took a shot in the dark and tried to Ghost again, only with the switches -FNI, -FFX, and -FRO

The first two have to do with the way Ghost accesses the drive.

-FRO = this instructs Ghost to continue cloning regardless of the number of bad sectors.

Ghost worked last night and drive in currently running with no apparent problems. Just for s&g, I used the seatools diag disk against the new HD. It basically reported passing all test NTFS except file integrity. Evenafter running additional tests, DeFrag and chkdsk, seatools reports errors....weird.

Hope this helps anyone else