My hard disk recently developed errors down to bad sectors on the drive, and now windows will not boot. I tried cloning the drive to a new 500 gb hard drive just purchased, but because of the errors, this was not possible. I then discovered spinrite, which began to repair the bad sectors and was successful at all it attempted. However, this hard disk has very little free space, it is 160gb and I believe once partioned, there is only around 1gb free. This meant spinrite estimated a finish time of around 200 hours which steadily increased over the course of the first 5 hours. Essentially, what I need is a program like SpinRite that would be abe to recover data from bad sectors, and then copy it to a new hard drive. Anyone know of anything that can do this or a method to carry this out? Thanks in advance :)

I cannot help with a program suggestion but simply reiterate a warning that you should always maintain a minimum of 15% free space on any drive. In your case approx 20gb. To fill a drive above 85% of it's capacity means that defrag ( and other recovery tools) do not have the room they need to function. As I understand drive function, when bad sectors develop, a certain amount of factory reserved space is available for re-allocation to replace the bad bits. If there are more bad sectors than the available reserved space then the drive is toast and data recovery outside a specialist lab is unlikely. Goin' Fishin' (Some day)

Some copying utilities will copy the bad sector table and others won't. You should probably use the utility provided by the manufacturer. It is on the disk that originally came with the new drive or you can download it from their site. Files that occupied the bad sectors are likely corrupted. If XP doesn't boot now it probably won't when you copy it over. You may need to do a repair installation of XP after the copying is complete.

hi no guarantee but try roadkil's unstopabble copier http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?...

Is there a way to boot unstoppable copier without using windows? It says it's availible on the Hiren boot cd but on the copy I have it does not appear!

hi yes its on ver 9.7 (havnt got 9.8 yet,) in the recovery section.

Easeus Data recovery. Works Great. Not free though. Best of luck.