AKICOLJ: disk copying software
Now, you may think that there's enough disk copying software out there that I don't need to ask (from *ix dd to Partition Magic and Parted). But they all have one big problem:
... if there is a bad sector, they stop reading!
Anyone remember the old DOS "Abort, Retry, Ignore" prompt? OK, it came up far too often, but it had that very useful feature, "ignore the error, pretend it worked and use whatever you have". Yes, you could end up with a file with a bit of corrupt data in the middle, but at least all the rest of the file (and other files) would get copied.
That feature seems to have disappeared from everything. I can't even get Linux to ignore read errors when copying. The best I've managed in the past has been to manually run dd, find out how much it has copied (and so the sector/track address) when it finds a bad sector, then restart it skipping that part (and adjusting the destination address accordingly). Very prone to error, and time-consuming.
So, that's what I'm after. A disk copying program (preferably also a partition manager, so it can do resize as well) which can handle disk read errors by ignoring the 'bad' data (setting it to all zeros or whatever). If it will produce a text file log of where it found the errors, so much the better.
Oh, and preferably in a form which can be written to a bootable CD, as booting from the disk with errors on it is not a good idea.
(For further information: the disk which is getting the bad reads is a WinXP one, and so far the only errors reported have been in the swap area -- which of course is cleaned on reboot so I don't care what is corrupted in the copying.)
... if there is a bad sector, they stop reading!
Anyone remember the old DOS "Abort, Retry, Ignore" prompt? OK, it came up far too often, but it had that very useful feature, "ignore the error, pretend it worked and use whatever you have". Yes, you could end up with a file with a bit of corrupt data in the middle, but at least all the rest of the file (and other files) would get copied.
That feature seems to have disappeared from everything. I can't even get Linux to ignore read errors when copying. The best I've managed in the past has been to manually run dd, find out how much it has copied (and so the sector/track address) when it finds a bad sector, then restart it skipping that part (and adjusting the destination address accordingly). Very prone to error, and time-consuming.
So, that's what I'm after. A disk copying program (preferably also a partition manager, so it can do resize as well) which can handle disk read errors by ignoring the 'bad' data (setting it to all zeros or whatever). If it will produce a text file log of where it found the errors, so much the better.
Oh, and preferably in a form which can be written to a bootable CD, as booting from the disk with errors on it is not a good idea.
(For further information: the disk which is getting the bad reads is a WinXP one, and so far the only errors reported have been in the swap area -- which of course is cleaned on reboot so I don't care what is corrupted in the copying.)