Noobie Question here.

HDD Cloning is mentioned alot on the forums of HDD guru.

The thing about cloning that is kind of counter-intuititve to me is this...

If you have two hard-drives

Hard Drive 0 - "To be recovered" - has alot of bad sectors

Hard Drive 1 - "Destination" drive


Surely the data that was on the bad sectors on Hard Drive 0 - will just be unreadable when it is passed onto the "destination drive" ? OR what magic happens when the data is put on a different drive?

Magic does not happen.

Special equipment could recover data from bad sector. It also depends on what type of damage there is.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

You still have to repair or reconstruct the file system after an image from a failing hard drive. Imaging is only part of the equation for data recovery.

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Imaging (imaging READABLE DATA only) is to work on a known good drive instead of on a time bomb ready to .... POOF !!!
OR "Clone it before it breaks" .
Some techniques or HW tools or HW+SW tools or PROPRIETARY tools are able to extract data from a failing / bad drive.

anymore thoughts on this on?

Also do not forget that sector defects are in hardware, they are physical. File system errors are a function of software, or more accurately, of data. The difference is that in the first case you have physical damage to the disk, and in the second case, the data is simply recorded incorrectly with no damage to the disk itself.

If you clone a damaged drive sector by sector, unreadable sectors will simply be left blank on the target drive. In effect, this runs physical damage into logical damage. Logical damage can be repaired up to a point, where physical damage cannot be. While you cannot generally reconstruct actual gaps in information, you can generally repair file system damage to the point the information can largely be retrieved.