Need good disk dump utility

On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 09:44 -0400, Paul Koning wrote: That's interesting. I've not seen a mention of an 'error' param before in the *linux* dd man pages, and don't recall it from other platforms that support dd either. There's a *noerror* param though - if set then it allows dd to continue even if it hits a read (and presumably write) error. If not set then dd will bail at the first sign of trouble. One thing that'd be useful would be a patched version of dd that could also retry reading bad blocks n times up to some command-line supplied maximum; quite often I find for marginal data (such as flakey floppies and hard disks) an initial read might work but one or more subsequent reads work find. Far as I know standard dd won't retry reading data at all. I've hacked together scripts before to do this, but a patch to the actual dd code would be a lot more elegant. cheers Jules