How to Fix: Clonezilla Fails to Clone Bad Sectors

SuppressLint by Linda on October 28, 2021 | Disk/Partition Clone | How-to Guides

On a Windows forum, someone asked, “Clonezilla failed due to bad sectors on my laptop's hard drive. Can chkdsk fix it?” Most of the answers recommended that the asker replace the hard drive. If you find yourself in the same boat but still want to try and save your old one, what should you do? We'll tackle that topic in this article and show you how to proceed with cloning a hard drive with bad sectors.

Why do hard drives develop bad sectors?

A hard drive is composed of multiple small storage units called clusters. A cluster is equal to one or multiple sectors, with the number depending on the hard drive's file system. Thus, a cluster is the smallest allocation unit, while a sector is the smallest addressable unit. When bad sectors occur on a hard drive, they become unresponsive to read or write requests.

Bad sectors usually come in two types: physical bad sectors (hard bad sectors) and logical bad sectors (soft bad sectors). Hard bad sectors can result from damaged read/write heads on a hard disk drive, dust on the sector, worn flash memory cells on an SSD, or other defects and wear issues.

A soft bad sector occurs when the operating system tries to read data from a sector on the hard drive and finds that the error correction code (ECC) does not match the sector's contents.

If the bad sectors on your hard drive are hard, unfortunately, there's nothing you can do to fix it. You should buy a new hard drive. However, if they're soft bad sectors, you can fix the hard drive by using a zero fill hard drive or by formatting the drive.

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How to fix Clonezilla failed to clone bad sectors issue?

In Clonezilla, there's an option that allows you to ignore bad sectors and continue with the clone. If you've tried this and it didn't work, we recommend trying an alternative to Clonezilla – the Disk Copy tool.

AOMEI Backupper is a tool focusing on disk cloning. You can use it to upgrade HDD to SSD, migrate OS to SSD without reinstalling Windows, or clone hard drive to USB drive, etc.

Here, the Disk Copy utility helps you clone a hard drive with bad sectors by skipping over them and reading as much of your data as possible. If you have nowhere to turn, download and install Disk Copy and follow along with our guide on how to clone a hard drive with bad sectors.

Step 1: Download, install, and run Disk Copy on your computer.

Click “Disk Mode,” then select the hard drive you want to copy or clone. Click “Next.”

Step 2: Select the target disk.

Note: If you are copying or cloning a source disk, the target disk should be at least as large as the source disk, or larger.

If prompted to erase the data on the target disk, click “OK.” If your hard drive has bad sectors, also check the “Copy Sector by Sector” option.

Step 4: Review and edit the disk layout.

If your target disk is an SSD, remember to select the “Target is SSD” option.

5. Click “ Proceed ” to begin the hard drive clone process.

Final Thoughts

That's it! In short, whether you can clone a hard drive with bad sectors or not depends on the type of bad sectors. If they are hard bad sectors, just forget about it and buy a new one. If they are soft bad sectors, you still have a chance to clone the disk with tools like Disk Copy. But keep in mind that this is not a 100% surefire method – it still depends on how severe the sector damage is.