kaled - 11:38 am on Oct 8, 2010 (gmt 0)

If a sector-by-sector copy is made and the target drive has bad sectors...

If the target drive can remap bad sectors there should be no problem, otherwise, the software will have to interpret the data (i.e. have knowledge of the filing system) and make changes.

Personally, I have suffered very few hard drive failures, I put this down to staying away from certain manufacturers but also staying away from cutting-edge drives. As a rule of thumb, I tend to stay 18 months to 2 years behind all cutting edge technology - this is good for the pocket as well as reliability.

These days, it's easy to imagine a drive having at least 1 Gig of flash memory to be used exclusively for replacing bad sectors but I don't know if any manufacturers do this.

Kaled.