11) What if you encounter a disk error?

How to cope with diskerrors e.q. bad sectors?

Disk errors or bad sectors may prevent you from making a full system backup or cloning you're disk.

For example the cloning process will stop immediately: see first sentence on screen shot Clonezilla: "Warning: The disk has bad sectors".

Now you should check your disk. I tried windows but it wasn't able to find and fix the error, neither CHKDSK nor the disk management tool.

The partitioning tool has an option to check the disk surface. The result was clear: 2 errors.

Obviously formatting the whole disk isn't an option because all data will be erased.

So what to do? There is a fair chance the disk might not work at all soon.

Because off the bad sector, my windows full system backup failed also. Yet it is important to make a backup immediately of as much data as possible.

• first of all, backup the userdata. Thats the most important because the all the software could be reinstalled. Not pleasant to do but you will be able to create a working system again. Use a different disk!
• next, make a backup of the whole disk using SYNCBACK. This has 2 advantages:

http://www.2brightsparks.com/download-syncbackfree.html

1. backup as much data as possible. SYNCBACK can't access certain system files but that is not important. My backup consisted of 152.000 files; 1542 files could not be backuped mostly because of restricted access. Mainly systemfiles, register key's, files in use, files with restricted access, etc. SYNCBACK builds a logfile containing the files it could not backup;
2. SYNCBACK will stop if it encounters a file that can't be backuped due to a bad sector or corrupted data;

In my case, I deleted the file where SYNCBACK stopped and tried the backup again. Then it worked fine as well as the windows full system backup. I did a disk surface check again but the bad sector wasn't gone. Problably the sector had a signature of being empty but am no expert.

If there is a problem with a windows system file, windows offers a method to check and repair.

Open command prompt with administrator rights. Command is SFC (system file check) with severall options:

Try to repair the disk error:

Good software to check the disk: from Western Digital

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=606&sid=3&lang=en

After the disk repair one error remained although the diskrepair stated that the errors were removed:

So how come?

The diskrepair software will take the bad sectors out of use and replace them by spare-sectors. Modern disks using SMART work that way. But the bad sector it self, the bad disk surface, will remain.
That means that cloning the disk or the partition the bad sector is located on/in, still doesn't work.

A backup though does work. So Plan A can be executed now.