Partition Saving - a warning

[howard schwartz]

I sysad pro has warned me about savepart ghost and other programs that image a
partition or disk to a file: If the original partition or disk has physical
problems such as bad sectors, and the disk, for example, automatically maps
date to spare good sectors on the disk -- you may find your restore does not
work.

That is, if the physical partition/disk is not exactly the same as it was when
you made the image -- one can imagine there may be trouble when one does
the restore.

Anyone have any experience with such a problem? Sounds like it makes a
good procedure problematic. The pro recommended file backup because of this.

The advantage of sector by sector copying is that, if your OS fails, you can
restore the whole thing using software from a floppy, without first
reinstalling the OS, so you have access to your (windows) backup utility.
This may no longer be the case with NTFS becoming the new standard
file system on disk. Copying or restoring backups from FAT media or other
media to NTFS, may be a problem in several ways.

 

[Roger Johansson]

I sysad pro has warned me about savepart ghost and other programs that image a
partition or disk to a file: If the original partition or disk has physical
problems such as bad sectors, and the disk, for example, automatically maps
date to spare good sectors on the disk -- you may find your restore does not
work.

That is, if the physical partition/disk is not exactly the same as it was when
you made the image -- one can imagine there may be trouble when one does
the restore.

The partition saving programs do normally not need a physically
faultless disk to restore on, it does not even have to be the same size.

The normal use for these programs is to copy only the used sectors, and
they are restored to the usable sectors on the hard disk.

In some very rare cases, if you use these programs for forensic work and
need to copy a hard disk physically exact you might get problems if the
disk you restore on is not faultless or big enough. But if you use them
for such special work you can afford to get a faultless disk to restore
the image on.

 

[Terry]

I sysad pro has warned me about savepart ghost and other programs that image a
partition or disk to a file: If the original partition or disk has physical
problems such as bad sectors, and the disk, for example, automatically maps
date to spare good sectors on the disk -- you may find your restore does not
work.

That is, if the physical partition/disk is not exactly the same as it was when
you made the image -- one can imagine there may be trouble when one does
the restore.

This is incorrect. All modern disk drives map out bad sectors, but
this is done in the disk controller (in the disk drive), so the BIOS
and programs like SavePart (and ghost and DOS and Windows and ...)
never see those bad sectors. Restoring a partition saved with SavePart
of other imaging programs will work, even if the drive has different
bad-sector-mapping.

Terry