Disk Image of Fauty Drive

[MasterCATZ]

just sussing out what program I should try

I am wanting to make an image of the Hard Disk so I can store it on the network

Does your program offer a way to skip any read errors for making an image ?


so far only DiskPatch seems to offer error skip with option to re try after main image has been created

unfortunately it seems to be HDD to HDD and I am after HDD to Image

tho I guess I could borrow an HDD from an Raid array temporarily


I did come across something last time I needed data recovery but unsure what it was

[Alexey V. Gubin]

In ZAR, the imager will do two passes, first processing the drive front to back, and if there is a bad block, certain range is skipped. Then, the second pass processes these skipped ranges back to front.

[MasterCATZ]

thanks for that .. exactly what I was after

for a while their I thought I might have to borrow a drive from Raid array for DiskPatch to do its thing then have ZAR give it a go


how ever how good is ZAR when Windows is involved
I have used ZAR before with good drives bad partition
worked teriffic
would windows layer be trying to interfering with ZAR / HDD ?
would I be better off with an boot able recovery tool set ?


would their be any way to have 3x passes ?

ie

first pass .. skip all read errors very low ms time out if 2x bad sectors are picked up a selected block of possible bad sectors can be skipped

second pass retry skipped blocks bad sectors with normal ms

third pass try and read every sector that failed with highest possible ms

[MasterCATZ]

thanks for that .. exactly what I was after

for a while their I thought I might have to borrow a drive from Raid array for DiskPatch to do its thing then have ZAR give it a go


how ever how good is ZAR when Windows is involved
I have used ZAR before with good drives bad partition
worked teriffic
would windows layer be trying to interfering with ZAR / HDD ?
would I be better off with an boot able recovery tool set ?


would their be any way to have 3x passes ?

ie

first pass .. skip all read errors very low ms time out if 2x bad sectors are picked up a selected block of possible bad sectors can be skipped

second pass retry skipped blocks bad sectors with normal ms

third pass try and read every sector that failed with highest possible ms


also what do you mean by "self-powered" operations.
( from another topic along these lines )

[Alexey V. Gubin]

The problem is, on hardware level, that once you tell a drive to read a sector, and the sector turns out bad, the drive will retry reads, even recalibrate, sometimes up to several seconds. During this process, it may or may not listen to the abort command - on hardware level, that is. If there is an USB-something involved, things become even worse, because USB bridges are not very good in anything except basic read/write. Sometimes you issue an abort command and the damn thing just locks up (requiring a power cycle which means you restart from the beginning of it).

In ZAR, there is a configurable timeout. The read starts, and if it is not completed within the timeout, ZAR issues the abort request. This passes through the Windows driver level (which is usually OK), down to the hardware level (which is mostly OK if you have SATA and rarely OK if USB is involved), and eventually to the hard drive. The hard drive hopefully responds to accept the next read request.

You will typically see rather quick if the particular hard drive (with its particular damage) is going to be imaged in a reasonable time, or not. If you see this is not going to work out, you can use any other imager which produces a raw, sector-by-sector copy (without any kind of compression), and then feed the image file into ZAR.

ZAR will work if you boot from the BartPE CD, but that is Windows environment again.