Ghosting from an SSD with errors/bad sectors

Ultragravy · Feb 7, 2023

Hey folks - quick question on behalf of a friend (so using second hand info sadly), hopefully covered here.

My friend has a Samsung Evo 870 SSD as their main windows system drive and apparently it's from a bad batch which was prone to failing. A check showed an ECC error rate of 177 so it seems to be somewhat faulty, and there's at least one large file on the disk that can no longer be read, so its clearly on its way out, so they've bought a new same-size SSD (Seagate) so they can replace it. However, due to the complexity of software on their system they really don't want to have to do a reinstall if they can help it, as there's been no actual errors/crashes/fails yet so the system in general is fine.

They tried Ghosting using Macrium Reflect but it failed twice giving read errors at some point along the ghost. We're not sure if anything important is in the unreadable bits.

Is there a decent way of ghosting a system disk that may have some parts of its file system unreadable/in bad sectors (and then just sorting any corruption from that out later), or is ghosting completely unviable and a full reinstall the only option?

Bree · Feb 7, 2023

Ultragravy said:
...tried Ghosting using Macrium Reflect but it failed twice giving read errors at some point ......is there a decent way of ghosting a system disk that may have some parts of its file system unreadable/in bad sectors (and then just sorting any corruption from that out later)

In Reflect's advanced settings you can tell it to ignore bad sectors when creating images.

Ultragravy · Feb 7, 2023

Thank you! My friend was able to successfully ghost to an image with that setting, and has now used that image to ghost a copy of the (broken) C: drive onto the new SSD.

Secondary question, and apologies if this one is a bit basic but trying to head off potential issues at the pass.

The ghosting is complete, and currently we have the SSD we want to replace as C: drive, and the new SSD is currently in a USB caddy, having been ghosted with a full image of the C: drive. However, as it was done in windows, Windows assigned the caddy/destination as D:

The plan is to simply swap the new drive in place of the old - will the machine automatically assign this ghosted drive as C: and change nothing else, even though it's currently identified as D: whilst it's in the caddy having been ghosted to? Just curious if we need to do anything before just swapping it in place of the old one so its a direct replacement, becomes the C drive and we can throw out the old SSD.

Try3 · Feb 7, 2023

Ultragravy said:
will the machine automatically assign this ghosted drive as C:

Yes.

Denis

davewin11 · Feb 7, 2023

Ultragravy said:
The plan is to simply swap the new drive in place of the old - will the machine automatically assign this ghosted drive as C: and change nothing else, even though it's currently identified as D: whilst it's in the caddy having been ghosted to? Just curious if we need to do anything before just swapping it in place of the old one so its a direct replacement, becomes the C drive and we can throw out the old SSD.

If the bad drive is still under waranty it should be returned to Samung for repair/replacing
Dave