Quick question on partition copy..

[EffBee]

Thanks in advance if you take the trouble to help me on this.

I have a four year old drive which has been thrashed to death during its lifetime. Windows event logs have been reporting odd bad sectors for some time now.

I have bought a replacement drive and have spent a happy morning trying to move the partitions off the old drive and onto the new one. Starting with the system partition.

99.7% of the stuff on the old system drive is fine. The computer runs perfectly. The bad sectors are currently under inconsequential files.

So I just want to copy the partiton from the old drive to the new one and ignore the bad sectors issue.

HOWEVER...

Drive Image 5 and PartitionMagic 7.0 proudly proclaim there are errors on the drive during the copy and rudely abort. No niceties like "carry on anyway...". I have run Checkdsk several times today with no parameters, a /f parameter and /r parameter. I have used the option in partitionmagic which is SUPPOSED to turn off checking but doesn't seem to turn it off completely. I have disabled the options in DriveImage concerned with verifications and error checking too. Both these utilities reboot into a temporary runtime environment to do the actual system disk copy.

In any case I thought hard drives were supposed to redirect bad sectors automatically. Anyone know why this is not happening and if I can interrogate the drive somehow to fnd out if its pool of spare sectors is used up?

My real question though is this. What is a good, preferably free utility which can reliably copy a partiton off a hard drive with errors, without going **** up when it hits a bad spot. Thanks.

I looked at the Spinrite utility as a fix but its too expensive to buy as a one off. I am thinking of throwing the Acronis products at it too. Acronis stuff seems to be good and I was think of buying it anyway.

 

[matja]

I'd grab the (free) linux-based Parted Magic LiveCD - http://partedmagic.com/ - it has a nifty utility called ddrescue which copies a disk/partition/file byte-for-byte to another disk/partition/file, retrying bad sectors the best it can, but importantly not aborting.

Also, in my experience, SpinRite works wonders - useful when you actually want your bad sectors back - I think it uses some sort of black magic to do its work

edit: Just thought, it might not be immediately obvious how to run ddrescue, so here goes:

click the terminal icon at the bottom and begin by identifing your drive names, IDE disks will be named /dev/hda, /dev/hdb and so on, hda1 being the first partition on the first IDE disk, SATA/SCSI are named starting from /dev/sda.

identify the disk and its partitions and filesystems with 'disktype', then run "ddrescue <from> <to>" when you are _double_ sure you have the right disks. (see screenshot)

 

[EffBee]

Thanks Matja, I'll look that up straight away.

I read the technical write up on Spinrite earlier today, at Gibson Research's website if memory serves correct. It isn't black magic but it does some pretty clever stuff.

Update: OK downloaded the ISO image and read the documentation on the Website. Burnt a CD from the ISO image. Booted off CD. God its funny seeing Linux running on this PC. Had a quick look through the Parted Magic menus. You are right Matja, its not obvious to a DOS/windows user what to do next. Relogged to this site to reread Matja's post. Easy and plain sailing so far.

Update 18:15
I went through the process and ended up with a copy of my faulty partition. Loads of files but some problems. The OS wanted to do a check on the copied partiton and had a field day. Unfortunately the end result is not bootable. Windows starts to load but some of the files have gone corrupt in the copy. The original is still fine bar the bad sectors I originlly posted about. Having a lot of fun but have timed out for today. NB I should have mentioned The first physical drive has two partitons on it, the first partiton is the OS and the second is just data. Normally there is another drive on the system with another two partitons for games and backup files. This drive is fine and I have temporarily put my new drive in its place. Odd that the Samsung is going down but the Maxtor is fine. People here seem to hate Maxtor. All partitons are NTFS. I noticed that /dev/hda seems to reference the physical device (ie both partitions) and /dev/hdb picked up the second physical device NOT the second partiton on the first physical device. Guess I need to find a linux manual online and read up a bit on referencing drives and partitons before having another go.