Hard Drive Failure?

[ROVZombie]

Hi Everyone,

 

Three questions,

1) Can bad sectors on a drive be transferred from one to another?

2) Can a backup be affected by a bad hdd?

and 3) I got a new hdd and tried to download windows updates on it, and i couldnt get them to download. Could there be a reason for that?

[Vitalius]

1)

Depends what you mean. Bad sectors mean the HDD cannot write to those sectors because they are damaged in some way. If that means the data on them is lost, then yes, that lost data won't get transferred to another drive.

If you mean "will copying bad sectors on one drive produce bad sectors on another drive" then no. That's not how that works.

2)

 

Again, it depends what you mean. If a bad HDD has bad sectors and can't recover data from them, then any backup made from that HDD will not have the data that was on the bad sectors. 

If you mean "will a backup that was already made from an HDD be damaged if the HDD later gets bad sectors", the answer is no. 

3)

 

I don't understand what you mean. What version of Windows and how did you download the Windows Updates?

[ROVZombie]

2) i try to backup and it will not complete

 

3) at the time, windows 7 and over the internet. some downloaded and installed, and then the rest just didnt

[Vitalius]

What are you using to backup?

[ROVZombie]

just a run of the mill external hdd with the windows utility

[Vitalius]

25 minutes ago, ROVZombie said:

just a run of the mill external hdd with the windows utility

Try something else like AOMEI Backupper or Clonezilla.

[xentropa]

39 minutes ago, ROVZombie said:

Hi Everyone,

 

Three questions,

1) Can bad sectors on a drive be transferred from one to another?

2) Can a backup be affected by a bad hdd?

and 3) I got a new hdd and tried to download windows updates on it, and i couldnt get them to download. Could there be a reason for that?

1.) Not likely.  Bad sectors would typically fail the Cyclical Redundancy Check (CRC) and the new hard drive would detect such error.

 

2.) Typically, errors on an HDD rise from data unable to be written or read properly.  The read/write head is usually the weakest point of the HDD and is the first to break.  So any breakage from HDD usage could be categorized as that.  Data disappearing from the magnetic platter (after it has been written and passes the CRC check) is pretty rare.

 

3.)  Not sure, seems like a software error to me.