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

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tehgerbil

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#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

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#2346161 30-Oct-2019 08:56

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

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#2346163 30-Oct-2019 08:58

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

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#2346169 30-Oct-2019 09:30

Thanks team. I really appreciate the help.

Varkk

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#2346172 30-Oct-2019 09:48

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

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#2346261 30-Oct-2019 11:43

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

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#2346284 30-Oct-2019 13:02

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.