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I have 2 Seagate USB3.0 2TB drives (formatted as fat32) of the same model. One of them has many errors, and needs to be repaired.

I've tried to copy the contents of the healthy disk to the damaged disk with 

cat /dev/hd(healthy) >/dev/hd(damaged)

However, errors were reported during this job, and I aborted the task.

I don't need the data from my damaged DISK, because I want copy the data of the healthy disk to the damaged disk.

Could I use dd or ddrescue to copy the data? Should I reformat the damaged disk?

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    Why did you copy the healthy disk to the damaged one? People usually do the opposite to recover their data from damaged disks. Did you try to repair the disk by overwriting it with "healthy" data?
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 15:35
  • What is "damaged"? If you have bad sectors or physical damage, you will be better off with the drive in the bin than trusting it with your data.
    – pulsejet
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 15:36
  • @KamilMaciorowski I dont need the data of damaged disk because is the same of healty hdd
    – Milor123
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 15:41
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    @Milor123, if you do have bad sectors, claim warranty if you have it. The disk wouldn't be of use for much longer.
    – pulsejet
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 15:44
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    ddrescue is supposed to continue its work in case of read errors. You will encounter write errors. I guess the process will exit like your cat did. Still you can give it a try. Please report how it went.
    – Kamil Maciorowski
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 16:17

2 Answers 2

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You cannot overwrite the bad sectors of the disk with healthy data. The on-board firmware has logic to test, attempt to correct or redirect data from a damaged portion to a new location and mark the sector as bad. A few bad sectors is not a big deal. However if you have a lot of them, it's a sign the disk is failing.

A good read can be found here: http://www.howtogeek.com/173463/bad-sectors-explained-why-hard-drives-get-bad-sectors-and-what-you-can-do-about-it/

I recommend you contact the manufacturer for warranty replacement.

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Hard disk, damaged, out of warranty - take tiny Torx drivers, open the drive casing, remove the nice magnets from the seek mechanism (careful of your fingers), decide if the shiny platters would make a nice Holiday ornament, recycle whatever is left. Unless you don't like strong magnets...

Want to copy data from good drive? Buy (or scavenge, if you are happy with 5 year old drives) another good drive. Pointless to copy onto a known damaged/bad drive. Even if it "succeeds" it will probably have more errors in the near future, and there goes your copied data.

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