dd and bad sectors

[e980238]

Hi all,

I was just reading some interesting comments on slashdot about drive imaging software. It seems as though everyone love dd. Well, what if your hard drive has lots, or any for that matter, of bad sectors and you image that to a brand new drive. Is it possible to copy over the bad sectors? Since dd is a bit by bit copy, I would assume that if it were at all possible that dd would definitely be a culprit. Any ideas?

[Gettinbye]

Bad sectors are a physical defect in a hard drive and therefore could not be "transferred" to a good drive, and your O/S should see that the truncated sectors were no longer bad on the new drive during the next scandisk/chkdisk operation. It's possible that data from the bad sectors on the original hard drive could be carried over, but as it would more than likely be corrupted, it should be seen as a file error and corrected by your O/S.

[e980238]

Oh well thats cool...I dont know where I got the idea that they could be copied over. I guess its just something I heard at the playground when I was younger or something

[e980238]

so even if the part of the hard drive that contains the information about bad sectors is copied to the new drive, it will recheck the sectors on the next scan and reclaim them since they are really not bad?

[Gettinbye]

Yes, or at least in a perfect world. There are always gray areas (odd, when you consider it all boils down to 0's and 1's),but in theory, yes.
*qualifying statement* when you run scandisk, to reclaim those bad sectors you'll probably need to check the "surface scan" option, which is unbearably time consuming.