Evil harddrive - Ghosting problems

[FishTankX]

Basically, here's the problem. The harddrive that i'm trying to ghost has bad sectors that are pretty much unrepairable. Any ghosting program I use.. partition magic, G4u, etc.. has stopped dead cold where the bad sectors were. Is there any ghosting problem that can 'Ignore' the bad sectors? Is there any way I can succcesfully transfer the system drive?

Drive in question is an old fujitsu 4400 RPM 2.4GB drive
Trying to Ghost to a Seagate 30GB U5

 

[redbeard1]

Ghost has an option to ignore errors that you could turn on and see if it would work. Otherwise the strongest program I know is from 7tools. I had a drive that was corrupt, that I wanted to copy before I reloaded the OS. I tried Ghost, Partition Magic and Acronis, and they just errored out. I ran 7tools Partition Manager and was able to do the copy the drive. Paragon hard disk manager is also very powerful. I had another drive with similar problems to what I described, and it was able to resize and copy the bad partition with it. Paragon came highly recommended by a support tech I was working with. Though I don't know of their capabilities for dealing with bad spots. The people that make the recovery software, R-studio, also make a drive imager. If this works as well as their recovery tools, it might work for you.

7tools

Paragon

R-studio r-tt

 

[corkyg]

Fix the bad sectors first - use Steve Gibson's latest SpinRite 5.X. It will map out the bad sectors and then you should be able to clone your drive. Norton Disk Doctor used to do that - but not with NTFS.

You might also look at Acronis' TrueImage 7 for cloning and imaging. It beats all the competition including Ghost - and one of its great features is that it will auto create a bootable CD so you don't have to have your OS running.

SpinRite

 

[redbeard1]

Spinrite is a really good program, but it only works on drives that are formatted with a FAT file system. So it won't work on NTFS.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: redbeard1
Spinrite is a really good program, but it only works on drives that are formatted with a FAT file system. So it won't work on NTFS.

Which makes me suspicious of how it supposedly "directly interacts" with the hard drive surface. It if did this, why would the file system matter?
Spinrite does seem like decent stuff though; maybe an advanced scandisk, but little more, in my opinion. I could be wrong though. But that file system dependancy makes me wonder.

 

[FishTankX]

Are there any free sollutions out there that might be of some help?

 

[FishTankX]

^

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: redbeard1
Spinrite is a really good program, but it only works on drives that are formatted with a FAT file system. So it won't work on NTFS.

Yeah - that is correct. It can be used on the drive provided you first change it back to FAT32 (Partition Magic 8 does that nicely) - then run SpinRite 5 - fix the drive surface - and convert back to NTFS.

Hopefully, Steve Gibson will produce a version that does NTFS, but presently he is working on privacy and security issues.

 

[corkyg]

Here's a freebie that might help . . .

Detecting and repairing disk errors:
You can use the Error-checking tool to check for file system errors and bad sectors on your hard disk.

Open My Computer, and then select the local disk you want to check. On the File menu, click Properties. On the Tools tab, under Error-checking, click Check Now. Under Check disk options, select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box.

Notes:

All files must be closed for this process to run. If the volume is currently in use, a message box will appear prompting you to indicate whether or not you want to reschedule the disk checking for the next time you restart your system. Then, the next time you restart your system, disk checking will run. Your volume will not be available to perform other tasks while this process is running.

If your volume is formatted as NTFS, Windows automatically logs all file transactions, replaces bad clusters, and stores copies of key information for all files on the NTFS volume.

 

[FishTankX]

Er... scandisk you mean? I've already put it through a full scandisk with repair errors checked.

No good.

 

[DemiSheep]

Use Symantec Ghost..

Boot ghost then exit it.

type: ghostpe.exe -fro

the -fro command line tells ghost to ignore bad sectors and to continue ghosting.

I've used this many times and its has saved my butt..

Do a search on symantec's web site for ghost switches..

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/docid/1998082612540625?Open&src=lnk_en?Open&src=bar_sch_nam&docid=2002091914103925&nsf=ghost.nsf&view=40c79ec65039a2b588256a0d004ca98e&dtype=&prod=&ver=&osv=&osv_lvl=

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: FishTankX
Er... scandisk you mean? I've already put it through a full scandisk with repair errors checked.

No good.

No - XP does not have ScanDisk - it is ChkDsk. What I wrote before is copied directly from the XP Help/Support screen.

Try Demisheep's Ghost switch - it should work. But the real solution is for IDE to do its job and map out the bad sectors.