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Last week a six year old Vista desktop blue screened with a registry error. Rebooting, it loaded fine. I ran SeaTools on the drive (Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB) and it said that I should replace the drive.

I bought a new drive and used CloneZilla to copy all the files over. I had to use -rescue and the option to repair bad sectors as it copied in order to get CloneZilla to copy files disk to disk. I cloned the disk because I wanted to save the time of having to reinstall windows and the many other programs that I use and then copy over files from backups. During the CloneZilla cloning, sectors were showing up as bad sectors with a lost data message.

Is there a way to get a list of bad sectors and the files present in those sectors? I don't notice anything wrong with the computer booting from the old or new hdd. I just want to be aware of any bad (potentially corrupt) files so that I can recover them from backups.

I saw this thread that mentioned WinHex but I don't know how to get a list of the bad sectors. I also tried Defraggler but it doesn't show any sectors as bad sectors only fragmented. Chkdsk fails to complete. I am struggling to find information on how to do what I thought would be a reasonable check to do.

How do I determine what file occupies a given sector?

UPDATE: I just compared the amount of used space Windows reports for the two drives. There is 584MB of difference, which is incredible. I tried using WinMerge to compare but it crashed with Windows giving a possible hard disk error.

I used Microsoft's free tool SyncToy. It found many differences between the hard drives but they all looked to be in logs, caches and temporary files. I think these differences are just because the newer hard drive has had a couple more days running Windows, anti-virus, updaters and web browsers.

I had no luck with WinHex with the limited number of bad sector addresses I wrote down from CloneZilla. WinHex says that there are 1.9 billion sectors but the numbers provided by CloneZilla for bad sectors are all in 10s of billions (45, 48 and 80 billion).

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    Is it possible recover data on a bad sector, it might not be possible, but not always guaranteed. Its a bad sector for a reason, because data cannot be written or read from that sector, hence the reason its bad. Furthermore the image does not contain all the data, only the physical drive does, since clonezilla likely skipped those sectors.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 17, 2014 at 17:36
  • The Drive Snapshot tool mentioned in the possible duplicate thread looks like it could do what I want. I will give it a try. Ideally, I would want to get the list of bad sectors without having to copy across ~1TB of data again.
    – TTransmit
    Commented Sep 17, 2014 at 19:31
  • Did you 'clone the disk' or 'copy files'. You are using both terms. If you really made a disk image a 584 MB difference is very weird. But if you copied files, this size comparison is meaningless (to many factors involving used disk space).
    – Jan Doggen
    Commented Sep 18, 2014 at 8:52

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