I was using photoshop and it created a heavy tmp file on the green drive. The drive was old. PC hung. WD dignostic tools could not complete test. Got disk read error. Drive was still opeing in windows explorer. It wasnt a main drive still windows did not boot so I removed it and put it in USB 3.0 enclosure. Shows in explorer. Crystaldiskinfo shows the statuts attached in image file. Drive keeps spinning if left inside PC on sata port thats why I removed it. Im not using the drive but data is important. I tried to copy some files via xcopy and it worked. Should I copy the entire drive like c:\xcopy c:\ d:\ or should i use HDD guru. This disk probably has bad sectors. Current Pending Sector Count is 000000000001 RAW and both current and worse values are 200. Uncorrectable sector count is 000000000002 RAW and both at 200.

What is the safer option to reliably copy or clone the drive ignoring bad sectors? I read HDDguru badsectors nut is the clone image made afterwards error free to be readable? Will xcopy be better but will give many Abort retry fail errors in DOS. I dont want to cause unnecessary disk activity only to damage the disk further or weaken it and have a non working clone or to repeat the copying process. I dont have many shots at this disk left. It will probably die after a cloning or copying session. So what to use...xcopy or clone

I would use ddrescue to clone the drive. It understands how to work around bad media.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The drive is just fine. Only one pending sector....
I would do the next:
1 . Scan the drive with option erase bad sectors [ I use Victoria for this purpose ]
2. Connect the drive as a second and allow Windows to repair the file system

The drive, its SMART and your files will be just fine

Thanks for the replies. I did try check disk form the windows menu but it ran till half or 60% then came back to 10% then went up and so on. I canceled it and the HDD was still spinning so I just switched of the USB 3.0 enclosure which the drive was plugged in to. The file system and directories still show in DOS and the drive comes up in windows explorer too. I copied a 12GB folder off of the drive in DOS using xcopy. Should I run victoria to erase bad sectors and then create image? In this case the disk activity would be doubled as victoria will erase and then some other software like ddrescue will image. Can I use Acronis to just image the drive? It has an option to just skip bad sectors. ddresue is linux but I did find a windows version of testdisk.

Hi streambuffer!

Sorry for inconvenience on forum!

for future reference; can you report us solution?

Thaks in advanced.