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I would like to ask for some help relating to a cloning issue, which is doing my head in! But first, some short background here: I have a 12-year old Dell OptiPlex 990 SFF, purchased in 2011. Apart from a couple of years spent in storage, the machine has been left running literally 24/7 since it was new. During that time, with the exception of a power supply failure, it has never missed a beat.

At the time of purchase, I replaced the OEM Seagate hard disk drive with a nice Western Digital 2TB Black, 7200RPM. That too has lasted incredibly well, with over 80,000 hours of runtime on the clock. Again, I put this down to leaving the drive running undisturbed, 24/7. The WD Black contained my life-long data, formatted as a single NTFS partition of 1.82TB, and was basically my ‘Master Data’ drive. The machine runs Windows 11, which resides on a 250GB Samsung 860 PRO SSD.

Over the years I have employed various backup solutions, but most recently, I have been using Easeus Partition Master and Easeus Disk Copy Pro to perform a full clone of my D: drive on a regular basis. The data is copied onto an external USB drive – a 2TB Western Digital Passport Ultra.

Last October I went away on holiday to Turkey for a week, and I stupidly shut the machine down. When I returned, I noticed that Partition Master would no longer allow me to clone the data drive, instead producing a ‘Sector Could not be Read’ error practically straight away. A whole raft of errors then started to appear on CHKDSK, and during a surface scan of the drive in Partition Master. I knew that the drive had begun to fail, and that I needed to act fast.

I had been planning to migrate the old WD Black onto an SSD for some time, but kept putting it off. However, with the drive now failing, this was the push that I needed! So I ordered a 2TB Samsung EVO 870, attached it to the machine using a Startech USB-to-SATA cable, formatted it to test that everything was OK, then set about cloning the failing 2TB HDD onto it.

As expected, I was unable to clone the drive using Easeus Partition Master, because the same ‘sector could not be read’ error appeared every time.

I was able to get round the problem by using Easeus Disk Copy Pro in ‘Sector by Sector’ mode, which took around 20 hours, and appeared to complete successfully. I made sure to select the ‘Target is an SSD’ option, to ensure correct 4K Alignment. During the operation, Easeus Disk Copy warned me of around 100 sectors which could not be copied, which, under the circumstances, didn’t seem too bad. In the end, only a few photographs seemed to be missing, so I restored these from the last successful backup I’d made, a few months earlier.

With the clone complete, I then set about removing the old WD Black HDD, and installed the new SSD inside the machine. No problems there, and everything seemed to work well – I now had two 2.5 inch SSDs mounted together in a Corsair Dual SSD mounting bracket, so everything seemed hunky-dory. I also ran CHKDSK /B on the newly imaged drive, which released around 416k of bad sectors, resetting the bad sector count to zero. I should probably also mention at this stage that both SSDs are partitioned using the GUID / GPT system.

The problems came when I attempted to run a backup on my newly installed Data SSD (D: drive). To my dismay, Easeus Partition Master still refused to clone my newly installed EVO 2TB SSD onto the external USB drive! The same error persisted: ‘Sector could not be read’. Just like when I attempted to clone the failing WD Black, the error occurred almost straight away, within 30 seconds or so of commencing the clone.

I ran CHKDSK again on the new SSD – absolutely no faults found. I did a full disk scan – no bad blocks. But somehow, it seemed that there was some kind of corruption that had been transferred from the old failing HDD to the new SSD. That same corruption was apparently stopping me from cloning the newly migrated data onto a backup drive.

I then scanned the new SSD using various different tools: HDD Tune, Samsung Magician, CrystalDisk Info. No issues were reported. But yet, EASEUS persistently failed during the ‘Reading Partition Info’ part of the clone… ‘Sector Could Not be Read’!

Interestingly, I also attempted to clone my new data drive using Macrium Reflect and also AOMEI Partition Assistant. Both of these packages completed the clone without issues. But yet the Easeus products would fail, and these are the ones that I have licences for.

Could anyone suggest what I might try in order to resolve this issue? It’s almost as if there’s some type of sector error right at the beginning of the disk, which is serious enough to stop Easeus Partition Master / Disk Copy from being able to make a clone, but yet not serious enough to show up in CHKDSK, or prevent Windows from accessing the drive.

I know that, if push came to shove, I could probably buy another 2TB SSD, format it, and do a simple file-copy operation from the existing SSD onto the new one, and the glitch would likely be gone. But really, if it can be done, I would like to find and fix the error within the partition that is stopping me from cloning the drive using EaseUS.

TLDR: I cloned a failing HDD onto a new SSD using ‘Sector by Sector’ copy. Now, when I try to clone the new SSD onto an external backup drive, the clone fails with a ‘Sector Cannot be Read’ error. CHKDSK and a whole bunch of disk scanning software cannot find any faults. How to fix, please?

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  • If the issue is limited to only one specific tool then probably the issue is with that tool. No one here can fix that for you. Contact author of the tool and work with them to debug the issue.
    – Joep van Steen
    Commented Apr 7, 2023 at 0:08

3 Answers 3

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You might have a logically broken partition table that is pointing to a location beyond the physical end of the disk.

Please run Testdisk and post the Testdisk log file here.

Even with a MBR-type partition table that error is possible because the MBR can address 2 TB of space, more precisely 2 TiB (=2^41) which is bigger than your disk size which is more likely to be around 2*10^12.

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  • Thank you - your suggestion of a damaged partition table sounds quite plausible. The drive utilises a GPT partition table, not MBR. So I will obtain a copy of TestDisk, and post the results here. Thanks again for the suggestion.
    – DJ Mean Al
    Commented Apr 6, 2023 at 18:33
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The balance of the evidence indicates it is Easus software at fault. Have you contacted them? And why is the error message so gosh darn vague? Unreadable sector? Well, WHICH sector exactly? That is essential information, and should be readily available from the software. If not, I would call the Easus program a dud.

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If you run chkdsk /f it should mark bad sectors as unusable and the cloning software is supposed to ignore them. You cloned a bad sector to a new drive. It will of course be unreadable as a result. The chkdsk should have been executed on the original drive, and when cloning, don't do a sector by sector mirror. Set it to data only and try again. You do not need physical duplication except where you're cloning drives being installed in systems with hardware security enabled. If that is what you're running into, you might have to do it the old-fashioned way of building the new drive from scratch install media and then copying the data over afterward. Best of luck

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    Bad sectors are unreadable sectors. An unreadable sector is cannot being cloned. Therefore the target location remains unchanged or is set to a defined value depending on the cloning tool. Therefore there corresponding target sector is physically readable but does not contain the content of the source.
    – r2d3
    Commented Apr 5, 2023 at 21:06
  • As it’s currently written, your answer is unclear. Please edit to add additional details that will help others understand how this addresses the question asked. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center.
    – Community Bot
    Commented Apr 5, 2023 at 21:06
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    Executing chkdsk is a risky game as you cannot reverse the result of the chkdsk process. Chkdsk will put a volume into a compliant state but simultaneously delete evidence needed for recovery software. Cloning data only is only useful when metadata structure are still readable on the source and the source only contains a low amount of data. In all other cases creating a full clone (containing every sector of the source) is the way to go. I don't understand the mechanism how hardware security plays a role in your reasoning.
    – r2d3
    Commented Apr 5, 2023 at 21:09
  • Just to answer some of the points above - I chose 'Sector by Sector' clone, because it was the only approach that would complete successfully. I was also warned NEVER to run CHKDSK on a failing drive, since it would basically finish it off! Hence, I performed the disk copy function first, THEN ran chkdsk afterwards, to remove any errors.
    – DJ Mean Al
    Commented Apr 6, 2023 at 18:31
  • "You cloned a bad sector to a new drive. It will of course be unreadable as a result. " - this is nonsense.
    – Joep van Steen
    Commented Apr 7, 2023 at 0:10

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