Trying to image old HD with bad sectors

[mpnut]

I have an old Seagate HD that I am trying to create an image of. I am using Norton Ghost to make a backup. When I do, it gets to about 50% and restarts the PC and come back with a "Read sector failure" message. I have tried running it with comman line swith -FRO which forces it to continue even with bad sectors. Ghost will complete but when I try to restore or view the image, I get a "Corrupt CRC packet header encountered - aborting". I have this HD hooked up as a slave and I am able to view the file structure in Windows Explorer.

I have also tried using Disk Checker but anytime I try to have it do anything on the HD it locks up my PC and I have to manually turn it off.

And Yes, I have run Chkdsk /R. It completes but doesn't do anything. I would really like to image this HD because there is some software on it that I no longer have the CD for and won't be able to install on a new HD.

I don't know what else to try from here. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[FXP]

I had the same problem with a Seagate and used Ghost 9.0 to make it eventually work. The problem are those clusters. You have to disable them, forget about recovering the data. I remember running Chkdsk and also got some utilities from Seagate off their site. I ran the utils over and over. I don't remember exactly what worked, but Ghost eventually did the job.

 

[mpnut]

Thanks for the quick response.
Any idea how to disable those clusters?

 

[Sleepsalot]

Hi MPNUT,

Have you tried writing zero's to the drive then reformating? This site has great tools for most everything

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com

it is an iso file to make a bootable utilities cd.
Wayne

Life is a big Roleplaying adventure.

Wayne

 

[mpnut]

I finally found a way to get what I needed. I ran Norton Ghost with a switch of -IA which "forces Ghost to perform a sector-by-sector copy of all partitions. By default, when copying a partition from a disk to an image file or to another disk, Ghost examines the source partition and decides whether to copy just the files and directory structure, or to do a sector-by-sector copy. If it understands the internal format of the partition, it defaults to copying the files and directory structure."

For anyone not familiar with how to run Norton Ghost with switches (I wasn't and had to learn out on the fly), when you are running a backup (or restore) you will see an "Advanced Settings" screen. Click button and you have some tabs to choose from. Choose the "Ghost Command Line" tab and you will have a text box to type in. Just type your switches in there. For my I just typed in -IA. You can use multiple switches, just seperate them with a space. Here is a list of switches:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/pfdocs/1998082612540625

.

It backed up fine and I was able to restore onto a new HD.