Advice on replacing hard disk with bad sectors

Question

So recently my I encountered an event 11 atapi error in my event viewer. It says The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0. I am running Win 7 SP1. This all started after I noticed some intermittent FPS drops when playing a game. I suspected it has something to do with my hard disk.

So I downloaded Seatools, ran all the available tests and the disk failed the long generic test but passed the others. I also ran HDDscan and crystaldiskinfo to check the smart values and it doesn't look too good:

https://imgur.com/a/yIuVxFR

Judging from the image, I think my hard disk has some bad sectors. So I transferred all my games to a different disk. Right now the disk only contains media files i.e movies, comics and music. There are no programs installed on this disk. It is 4 TB in size, partitioned into 4 parts, but not all the space are used. It still has roughly 1.2 TB free.

The thing is, even though this hard disk is only roughly 5 years old, it rarely sees heavy duty work. I only use it to dump media files into. Most of the time it remains unused, except for occasionally viewing the stored media files. It's a seagate ST4000DM000. I'm a bit dissapointed, since my other drive, a Toshiba is running perfectly fine with no errors reported despite being older and having all my programs and windows installed on it. It's definitely seen more usage than the Seagate.

I ordered a new WD Red 4 TB and right now I need several advice on how to proceed. I want my new drive to be as my old drive with all the partitions for a seamless experience so I have several questions:

• Should I just clone the old hard disk onto the new one? If I do this, what are the risks of the having the bad sectors replicated onto the new drive? Will this decrease the longevity of the new drive?
• Or should I use Windows 7 backup tool to backup the entire hard disk to the new one and restore it? If I do this, can windows restore the exact clone of my old drive with all the partition letterings? Will the bad sectors be duplicated?
• Or should I just make the exact same partitions with the new disk and copy and paste everything manually? Which method is the safest?

And finally when the transfer is complete, can the old hard drive still be used after I reformat it? Are the bad sectors fixable?

Thank you very much for your advice. t

Answer 1

Can the old hard drive still be used after I reformat it? Are the bad sectors fixable?

Bad sectors are not fixable. Once a drive starts to fail, failures increase. Discard the drive.

Should I just clone the old hard disk onto the new one? If I do this, what are the risks of the having the bad sectors replicated onto the new drive? Will this decrease the longevity of the new drive?

SuperUser.com does not deal in 'should', just 'can/cannot'. See https://superuser.com/help/dont-ask

If you clone-copy the drive, data on bad sectors will not be copied; you will end up with blank sectors on the new drive. See Does cloning a hard drive also copy over errors like bad sectors?

Or should I use Windows 7 backup tool to backup the entire hard disk to the new one and restore it? If I do this, can windows restore the exact clone of my old drive with all the partition letters? Will the bad sectors be duplicated?

The Windows 7 backup tool works on a drive letter basis, copying what it finds in a partition which is mapped to a drive letter; it does not copy the entire disk's partitions at once, and is not a cloning tool. When you restore, you choose what drive letter to restore to, which can be the same, or different, than what you now have.

Or should I just make the exact same partitions with the new disk and copy and paste everything manually? Which method is the safest?

No method is safe except restoring from a backup made before drive failure began.

However, there are tools which will try to read the data on bad sectors and move it to good sectors. You may be able to get good data using these methods before you clone, backup-restore, or copy drive-to-drive. Haven't dealt with this problem in a long time, but it has worked in the past.

Also, media files are somewhat resilient. Because of their compressed nature, an error is not as severe as if you were trying to recover a database.

See https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery_news/how-to-restore-broken-sectors-and-fix-hdd-errors.htm and https://www.disk-partition.com/windows-10/bad-sector-repair-windows-10.html , look for other tools, then make a decision on what that data's worth to you as to what you want to spend in money and time to try recovery.