I have had two different drives come in within the last week that have nearly the same problem. They are both SATA drives, one is WD, the other is Seagate. The problem is, whenever I go to clone or image the drives, as soon as it hits a bad sector the heads just quit reading. Even if I restart the cloning process from a point where it was just able to read from, it comes back with a read error.

Both drives start up perfectly, they calibrate without any problems. No unusual noises, no clicking. But the instant it hits a bad sector, the drive is pretty much useless until you shut down and restart. I've only seen this in these two SATA drives, and just thought it was odd.

So,

try MHDD scan and see if using "sector skip" (right arrow button) to pass
these "bad sectors".

Also try to scan at say middle of drive (in MHDD of course)

and report on your diagnostics.....

It definitely can get past the bad sectors in MHDD. Is there a program similar to that, that can be used to create an image or clone the drive? I've used Media Tools, Speedclone, and even in a PC3K express test the drive just completely dies when it hits a bad sector. If I could find a program that would allow the drive to keep functioning past the bad sectors, like MHDD is doing, and also allow me to create a clone or an image at the same time, that would be ideal. I'm trying to avoid the $3,800 disk imager from Acelab if at all possible.

The problem may be not only some bad sectors, but one head that's damaged or getting damaged.

The problem is, the drive can go through periods of a few hundred thousand, even a million sectors, with no problem at all. But it will consistenly encounter the same exact bad sectors time and again, and as soon as it hits those sectors, the drive ceases to function. Sometimes when a head is degrading, you can see a distinct patter, especially in some of the tests within PC3K. There are no patterns here, it's just that the drive heads stop once they hit a bad sector and the only way to get them going again is to reboot. I'm going to see if I can use MHDD to basically create a map of bad sectors, and then image the chunks of good sectors in between the bad ones.

Winhex.

X-ways dot de

Forgot to mention I've used WinHex on it already, and it does the same thing. Hits a bad sector, drive dies, and WinHex speeds through the rest of the imaging process recording nothing but ??BAD SECTOR?? for the remainder of the drive.

HD Duplicator may be the cheapest solution for this. It's $400, plus $100 for a power controller (I'm cheap, so I designd my own