On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 01:35 -0500, Tim Riker wrote: 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

John Foust wrote: For the record, Spinrite 5 works on any machine (but there's a bug where it only works on 8088/8086 if you use DOS 5 or higher -- I've tried DOS 3.3 and 2.11 and it hangs). I use Spinrite 5 on my IBM 5150 all the time. (Spinrite 6 requires 386 or higher. Spinrites 1 through 4 work on any machine with any DOS version, but 5 is the fastest.) -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/

In message <6.2.1.2.2.20050618110023.0532c870 at mail> John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote: I know that - in my experience it tends to cause more harm than good (and Dynastat just looks like someone's attempt at creating computer eye candy). Later. -- Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB, philpem at philpem.me.uk | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice, http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI ... Where's my 640Meg SIMM? I want to run Excel!

In message <6.2.1.2.2.20050617084121.04677a18 at mail> John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> wrote: I've never understood the attraction to Spinrite. I borrowed a friend's copy of SR6 a while ago - I used it on a 4gig Samsung IDE drive and a 10gig Maxtor, and it didn't recover anything off them.. just displayed the "Trying magic sooper-seekrit Dynastat data recovery.. oops, failed" window a lot. In fact, I think the error count actually went up - when it was finished with the Samsung, I rebooted and got a barrage of SMART Failure Imminent errors. I had more luck with Knoppix, "dd if=/dev/hdb of=/root/hdimage conv=noerror". Speaking of hard drives, I still need to replace the dead drive in my data recovery box. I'll probably end up getting a Seagate - Maxtor's quality control seems to have slipped a bit. That or they've designed a load of failure prone drives. Quantum's legacy, back with a vengeance. I've got an 80gig D740X here that's fine, a 20gig D740X that's rather noisy (should have RMA'd it when I had the chance - it's started throwing up SMART errors) and a 7850AV that refuses to die. Had one 40gig DM60+ fail (it had trouble spinning up), and an 8.45GB that required freezer treating, but that's it. The StorageReview reliability survey suggests Maxtors are getting worse, but I'm not so sure... There are a lot of "Failed within a month" entries on there with the same user ID... Later. -- Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB, philpem at philpem.me.uk | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice, http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI ... Life shouldn't be an endless repetition of stale successes.