Q: Cloning Disks with Bad Blocks

Your best best it to perform a full disk based backup to an external drive. In the backup settings have Acronis ignore the bad sectors. You could then place the new drive in the system, boot your system to the Acronis Rescue disk/media that you should have created or downloaded from your Acronis account, and perform a restore from the backup file on your external disk to the new drive. This gives the same results as a clone, but with greater flexibilty. I would stay away from cloning if at all possible. If the bad blocks contain data you would not be able to backup the data contained on them anyway. If you can/could backup the data, it would probably be corrupt. After backing up the data on the drive with the bad blocks, you should run the disk drive manufactures drive testing product on it to see if they can be marked as bad and good blocks be substituted for them.

Good thoughts, thanks. I should have mentioned the bad drive and the new one will not be system/boot disks. It is a data disk. I'll check the backup option and ignore bad sectors, as you suggest.

I don't want to sound like a spaz, but I really like Acronis cloning software and have never had issues with it, so that's why I was thinking about thaking that route.

I'll post how it all goes.

Just wanted to let you know the backup and restore worked great. I did lose some data in the bad sectors, but thankfully nothing critical. I appreciate the help in showing me that I should not clone, but backup and restore instead. I actually backup another drive as a safety precaution.

Clone is rarely the correct option. In the vast majority of uses, the best course is to use Backup, as James F indicated.