How to Copy or make a backup image without bad blocks?

[Rick]

TIA

Its useless make a backup image with bad blocks as that's where new malware will hide...
Backups copy bad blocks too, whats the use buying a new hard drive?

[Still_Game]

I don't think you're correct in your assumption that a backup solution will copy bad blocks (bad sectors). For instance, using my backup solution of choice, Casper 10, to make a bootable copy to a new hard drive, the copy will have all the original operating system, programs and data files but I can't see any scenario where bad blocks could be copied across. Or am I missing something?

[Boggin]

HD Sentinel was reporting a spiralling number of bad sectors on one of my laptops, although none of the other diagnostic programs found anything.

However, I decided to err on the side of caution and created a system image using Macrium Reflect Free and copied that onto a new HDD and everything worked just fine after, so it may have been debatable as to whether there was anything wrong with that HDD.

Macrium Reflect Free has an option to ignore bad sectors, so a system image could copy bad sectors, but performing a chkdsk /r first before the system image would mark sectors as not to be used.

If your HDD has bad sectors then you should take preventative steps straight away before you lose everything.

It's highly unlikely that malware would reside in bad blocks as they wouldn't be used by the system.