Is there a piece of software that would allow partition copying, but..

**katana** · 20th March 2015

Full story,

Have a 1tb computer drive that has alot of bad sectors so was thinking to copy the two partitions, which are the operating system back up/win 8 loader and operating system to an external hard of 500gb, the data on the tb drive is less the 50gb both partitions. Then format the 1tb hard drive and then copy the data back to the 1tb drive.

I would keep the 500gb 'back up' so I can reinstall the data to a new drive once it arrives via amazon.

Thank you

**grrrd** · 20th March 2015

Each partition should have a letter? I would use imagex and an exclusion list.

**evilsatan** · 20th March 2015

If there are a lot of bad sectors then don't use the drive again, when they start to go bad it could fail at any point. If you have already ordered a new drive then I would be tempted to just back up your important files to the external just in case and when the new drive arrives use clonedisk to migrate.

**plug1** · 21st March 2015

I would do you what you suggest then dban the drive .low level format and scan it again .
use the drive tools and unmark the bad sectors in the drive flash mem.
Worth a try .

**evilsatan** · 21st March 2015

Just don't use it for crucial data or at least make sure there is always a backup. Drives are so cheap now I don't like risking it, what I do here is secure erase using DBAN if possible (but new sata controllers/drives can struggle even in ide/compatibility mode for some reason) then label them not to be used for data. Handy to have sore drives to quickly install a temp OS to for the odd job.

**katana** · 29th March 2015

In the end waited till the new drive arrived and used HDD raw to make a copy of the drive to the new drive. The computer is running faster and less time, well none at all, is spent waiting for the computer to do things. The old drive, a western digital, I reformated with the wd tool and ran a drive wipe with 1 and 0 the ran HD tune surface test and no more bad blocks so far. So before the drive was littered with red blocks and now there are none so far and the surface test has just gone past the 500gb stage.