Sectors are marked as bad after an image is restored

This article applies to:

• Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Editions
• Acronis True Image Home 2010
• Acronis True Image Home 2009
• Acronis True Image 11 Home
• Acronis True Image Echo Server for Windows
• Acronis True Image Echo Server for Linux
• Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server
• Acronis True Image Echo Workstation
• Acronis True Image for Microsoft Small Business Server
• Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Windows
• Acronis True Image 9.1 Server for Linux
• Acronis True Image 9.1 Enterprise Server
• Acronis True Image 9.1 Workstation 

Symptoms

1. You back up a hard disk with bad blocks;
2. You restore the backup to a new hard disk that has no bad blocks;
3. After the restore there are bad blocks on the new hard disk.

Cause

When Acronis product creates a backup archive of a partition or a disk that has bad sectors, it records the information regarding the bad sectors as well.

If you restore the backup archive, you will have these bad sectors on the new location. The sectors will not be actually bad, but they will be marked as bad in the file system, because the backup is restored without any changes.

Solution

To avoid transferring bad sectors to the new location, restore the backup archive resizing the partition(s). See Acronis True Image: Resizing Partitions during Restore to Larger/Smaller Hard Drive.

You can also run the chkdsk /r command on the restored disk. This will fix the sectors incorrectly marked as "bad".

More information

See also:

• Resizing Partitions during Disk Cloning
• Acronis Disk Director Suite/Server Cannot Resize Partition with Bad Blocks.