17 Jun
2005
17 Jun
'05
7:32 a.m.
On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 01:35 -0500, Tim Riker wrote:
Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
dd conv=noerror,sync
is probably what you're after.
That's the one. It'll pad output with zeros where any bad blocks occur.
Keep a note of the dd output that goes to the terminal too (otherwise
you won't know years later which were bad blocks and which were
intentional blocks of zeros :)
Including output of 'fdisk -l' on the drive on the archive is useful too
as it'll tell you what geometry Linux is using for the drive (as well as
a dump of the partition table if it's of a type that fdisk understands).
In the case of MFM / RLL drives it'd be worth making a note of what
model disk controller the drive was hooked up to.
I have a feeling dd is available under Windows in the gnu utils port -
but it wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't understand reading from raw
disk devices (even assuming that Windows has the necessary support for
MFM/RLL disk controllers in the first place)
As for DOS - you'd *probably* end up writing some code to talk to the
disk controller; how complex that'd be I don't know.
cheers
Jules
As long as
you don't hit a bad block.
Someone (I think Jules or Philip) figured out there's an option you can
specify on the command line to tell dd to skip bad blocks and replace any
bad sectors with zeroes.