Re: OT! OT! Hard Drive Cloning

But, for the past 10 years, HDs remap sectors internally from a pool of spare sectors. The thorough test of Scandisk and Norton is useless. For Scandisk it was always useless, because, as I have seen, when it tested sectors I knew to be bad it simply took longer, because it was retrying them and then reporting them as good.

I once had an IBM Deskstar 45 GB hard drive that started giving me problems with bad sectors after about 2 years of use. ScanDisk and Norton Utilities both could find them and mark them as bad. Googling about it I found that the problem was a known issue with this particular drive. In the 15 years I've been using hard drives, this was the only one that's given me bad sectors. It's still in use today in my work PC where everything is stored and backed up on a daily basis over the network, so I don't really care if it ever dies.

If you get bad sectors, funny noises, or the drive occasionally refuses to spin-up, I'd say backup your stuff ASAP and avoid using the drive for any critical data. Drives are cheap these days, your data isn't!

Costas

I think that indicates that the pool of spare sectors was all used up, so it had to start marking them at the file system level.

Another one of the wonders of modern science from Microsoft, make scandisk try 5 times to read and make copy try 3.

Every time I do a CHKDSK on it, it says: "XXXXX bytes in Bad Sectors". So it knows about them and doesn't allow the heads to read/write on them. Some defragmentation software also shows little red squares in the drive map, to indicate the bad sectors. The HD is still going strong (been two years since the problem came up). No more bad sectors, but I wouldn't trust it with any critical data.

Thinking about it, with the current sizes of hard drives, it's kinda scary! I mean, it's not easy to back up because of the large size, and if the thing dies you lose a ton of stuff (again because of the large size)...

Costas

I suspect they got some heat from hard drive makers to cause their products to appear more reliable.

On a sunny day (Tue, 13 Jan 2004 19:32:39 +1100) it happened Russell Shaw wrote in :

I think in modern hard disks the 'bad sectors' are mappen in the firmware of the disk. For the OS it seems like one long range of sector addresses of 512 bytes. The drives perhaps have some flash memory for that?. As far as the extra space goes, I DID copy cat /dev/hda > /dev/hdb, and it worked (with hdb bigger a few GB). You lose the extra space... Maybe a play with fdisk could be done to create an extra partition in this space, but I stopped when it was all working (sold that other system), not worth the risk. JP

once in a

XCOPY does copy LFNs if you run it in a window rather than boot DOS. I don't know about XXCOPY, but is there a problem with XCOPY's handling of LFNs?

I use XCOPY on my system just to make backups of data folders. I agree that neither is any good for making a complete copy of a windows system partition.

You can create a bootable Win9x clone disk using just free (for personal use) XXCOPY, including the file name issues. But apparently not for Win2K. Dunno why. Check out

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

There is a problem not with LFNs per se, rather WinBlows loses track of the correlation between LFNs and SFNs. Since SFNs are stored in the registry all heck (TM) can break loose when the right SFN points to the wrong LFN.

As long as you don't care what the LFN->SFN correlation is, your ok. FOr data files this isn't usually a problem (but can be). For system files and applications this can be a disaster lurking (it's not immediately obvious when the mixup happens).

I see what you mean now. It's just intrinsic to the primitive MS system of numbering them!

I use it, and I've wondered if it defrags when moving or resizing. I didn't think of checking when I last did it. What if resizing couldn't be done without defragging? And if it does, then I would hope that they do it in a way that's recoverable if there's a power loss or something in the middle of the operation. (I know it's dangerous if moving a partition and the new location overlaps the old.)

I think the last statement was supposed to be PQMagic, right?

zactly.

Can you unmount your boot disk?

So then do you have to install Windows and Partition Magic? ;-)

scandisk (noun) from scan + disk 1. A Microsoft utility typically seen when starting Windows.

No, but you can remount it read-only. That guarantees a consistent file system for the backup.

Regards,

Iwo

No, but I can easily run linux off a single 1.44mb floppy and use it to run dd.

If I want an exact clone of a disk, I just dd from the original to the clone. If I want to transfer the contents of a partition, I usually partition the new disk, and cat the old partition onto the new, and run lilo if it is to be a boot partition.

Nope, there are standard utilities in linux that allow you to extend or collapse data filled partitions. There is never any good reason to use a winblows anything. That is not to say that you aren't sometimes forced to use windy doze, but being forced isn't a good reason.

-Chuck

AFAIK, it doesn't defrag. It simply copies data structures from one filesystem to the other.

yes.

Howdy!

Not LFNs - but the SFN aliases.

Instead of copying them, it generates new ones.

Which can be VERY fatal to the registry keys ... sigh.

Example: Create a folder, and make the following three files:

This is a very long file name 1.txt This is a very long file name 2.txt This is a very long file name 3.txt

Delete "This is a very long file name 2.txt" and then copy all three files to a new directory.

You'll find, with the DIR listing from a command prompt, that the target is THISIS~1.TXT and THISIS~2.TXT from THISIS~1.TXT and THISIS~3.TXT ...

XXCOPY copies the SFN aliases also ..

RwP

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