24 Feb
1999
24 Feb
'99
6:28 a.m.
At 07:10 PM 2/24/99 +0000, you wrote:
Yes, you need a read-raw utility that's smart enough to inject
null data when the sector can't be read. I think it's useful
to know that the archived disk had errors when reading, and
to record that in the file. Also, a file header can be useful
for indexing - then there's something in the file that can
represent what was scrawled on the paper label, for example.
- John
You want your
raw disk
reader to be able to recover from those types of errors, too.
Is this a big problem?
Unless the bad sector has to remain bad - i.e. it's used for part of a
copy-protection scheme - then surely archiving it as _anything_ is OK.
The OS should ignore bad sectors when you use the real disk, so if you
write the image back to a real disk, it will ignore the arbitrary data
you stuck in the image.