If I clone a failing HDD will this clone the errors as well?

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tehgerbil

641 posts

Ultimate Geek

#259912 30-Oct-2019 08:39

Hi guys, sorry if this is a stupid question, if I clone/copy an existing 120GB SSD that's really old (6 years now) on to a newer, second hand 240GB SSD will this be beneficial or should I just format/reinstall Windows?

The existing SSD has disk errors every month or so and needs Chkdsk run periodically. Will this replicate those errors to the new SSD?

toejam316

914 posts

Ultimate Geek

Trusted

#2346161 30-Oct-2019 08:56

One person supports this post

Shouldn't be a problem - the biggest risk when it comes to cloning a faulty disk is that the strain of all the read ops might cause the drive to fail, and I suspect that's less of an issue with SSDs.

Anything I say is the ramblings of an ill informed, opinionated so-and-so, and not representative of any of my past, present or future employers, and is also probably best disregarded.

timmmay

15690 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Subscriber

#2346163 30-Oct-2019 08:58

3 people support this post

Reinstalling the OS occasionally is generally beneficial, to clear out the crud. Instead of 6 years of patches you start from a fairly fresh OS that's then patched to the latest. I'd do that.

Installing the OS and key programs doesn't take that long, but it does take a while to get it back to how you like it.

tehgerbil

641 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2346169 30-Oct-2019 09:30

Thanks team. I really appreciate the help.

Varkk

368 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2346172 30-Oct-2019 09:48

One person supports this post

The answer is really "it depends". On some flaky disks I have had a clone work with no issues. I have seen some have some issues which are fixed up by a simple chckdsk once on a new healthy disk. I have also seen some with bad unrecoverable errors which even on the new hardware were unable to be repaired.

1101

2013 posts

Uber Geek

#2346261 30-Oct-2019 11:43

2 people support this post

Any corrupted files will be still corrupted when cloned .

If you are happy that Win is stable, then clone as is . You can allways wipe & reload at a later stage if needed
A clean install is allways a good option. It just takes more time to reload everything , download updates , restore doc's etc

duckDecoy

82 posts

Master Geek

#2346284 30-Oct-2019 13:02

One person supports this post

Sort of a side note here, but this is a great product for fixing drives with errors AND for preventative maintenance: https://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

The general idea is that it forces the drive to examine itself very deeply, and lets the drive notice where it has issues and to correct and swap out faulty areas. Its very good at making the drive try every conceivable attempt to recover data from faulty areas rather than just giving up.

As well as fixing issues during the self examination it also enables the drive to see areas that might not have failed yet but are looking a bit shadey, and the drive can swap them out preemptively before the issues arise.

Not cheap though, $89 USD. But it works.