Imaging an SSD with Bad Sectors

[Genetic_Junk]

My operating system SSD has bad sectors. The drive is still functional, but SMART says failure is imminent. Traditional backup programs could not make an image of the drive due to I/O errors.

I was able to use ddrescue (https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/) to image the drive. Over 99.99% of the data was saved.

To avoid having to reinstall the OS and many programs, I'd like to write this image to a new drive. Because I made the image while the drive was functional, it seems like it might work. Does anyone have experience with this scenario? Is using this image a recipe for trouble/performance issues down the line? I'm guessing it depends on what is stored in the bad sectors.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[lunardigs]

As long as you have the disk image backed up, you can try to image a new disk with it and see what happens. If it fails, you'll still have your original image.
Theoretically though, it should work, since ddresuce has error handling for reading bad sectors. It will try to recover the maximum amount data, and gracefully continue where it can't.

[planetearth]

What @lunardigs suggests is basically the best you can hope for, so you might as well try it.

When you say the clone copied "99.99%" of the data, was that provided by ddrescue, or are you just estimating? And were you able to see what wasn't copied?

Obviously, if it was something in the OS directory, you *might* have a problem (but if you're running Windows, you can have it try to "restore" itself). But if you have a drive with "Recovery" and other partitions (such as those made by Dell and HP), it may not even matter if they weren't cloned accurately.

Steve

[Genetic_Junk]

As long as you have the disk image backed up, you can try to image a new disk with it and see what happens. If it fails, you'll still have your original image.
Theoretically though, it should work, since ddresuce has error handling for reading bad sectors. It will try to recover the maximum amount data, and gracefully continue where it can't.

Thanks for the advice. Yep, ddrescue is a great program.

When you say the clone copied "99.99%" of the data, was that provided by ddrescue, or are you just estimating? And were you able to see what wasn't copied?

Obviously, if it was something in the OS directory, you *might* have a problem (but if you're running Windows, you can have it try to "restore" itself). But if you have a drive with "Recovery" and other partitions (such as those made by Dell and HP), it may not even matter if they weren't cloned accurately.

Steve

The 99.99% came from ddrescue. It is possible to determine the bad sectors using the map created by ddrescue, but I haven't done that.

Seems like whatever is bad is not critical to the OS. I ran sfc and nothing needed to be repaired.

The new drive should be here on Saturday. So I'll give it a go and report back. I plan on using this guide: https://www.technibble.com/guide-using- ... over-data/

[planetearth]

Even if SFC /SCANNOW doesn't find anything, you might also want to run this:
DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

It finds other issues SFC doesn't necessarily look for.

Steve

[sempondr]

I would install Windows and all the programs again to get a brand spankin' new system. And I bet it wouldn't take much longer than all the time you've spent on doing repairs etc..

[Genetic_Junk]

Even if SFC /SCANNOW doesn't find anything, you might also want to run this:
DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

It finds other issues SFC doesn't necessarily look for.

Steve

I forgot about dism. Thanks for the reminder.

I would install Windows and all the programs again to get a brand spankin' new system. And I bet it wouldn't take much longer than all the time you've spent on doing repairs etc..

If restoring the image to a new drive doesn't work, I'll have to do that. Although, I probably won't install all the programs. I've accumulated too many over the years.

[BertKoor]

I probably won't install all the programs. I've accumulated too many over the years.

That's actually a good reason to start from scratch again. You only need your Documents folder (and other 'real' data) although I've lost that as well (more than once) but can't say I really miss anything.

[uOpt]

Restoring such an image doesn't require anything special.

Taking such an image needs special software because bad sectors must not be skipped, they need to be replaced (usually with binary zeros). But once you have the image you splatter it onto the replacement disk the same way you would a normal image.

After connecting such a restored disk to a computer you run fsck (or equivalent) and hope for the best.

The "99.9%" statement is not very useful. 0.1% of a big disk is actually a lot of data missing. But either way you don't know whether the missing sectors are in files, file metadata (such as directories) or general metadata (such as superblocks and allocation tables). It's a game or bad or good luck. Try not to have bad luck.

[Genetic_Junk]

Thanks again for all the advice. Everything seems to be working ok after using dd to write the image to the new drive.

[lunardigs]

Nice!