Hi, I've been using Knoppix "Live CD" 6.2 and partimage 0.6.7 to back up and restore my Microsoft Windows XP system volumes on various computers.

However, partimage seems to be unwilling to back up one of these NTFS volumes which has bad sectors, some unreadable data. It hits that and stops.

But this appears to happen at the same place when I have already used Windows to find and mark and, I assume, remove from use, the bad sectors. Hmm. I thought they'd be ignored. It appears I thought wrong.

If so, which of several other Linux-based or other partition backup tools may be suitable for the task - to ignore or tolerate bad sectors?

The main goal is to be able to update the volume subsequently in a way that may be a terrible mistake, and in that case to restore the previous version. Sometime not too far in the future, I suppose I have to think about replacing the disk.

TIA.

In the past Windows was very bad indeed at deciding whether a hard drive was damaged or not. I do not know what it is like now, but I'd think twice about assuming the hard drive does in fact contain bad sectors. Someone who is more up to date would know.

You can use the command line tool ntfsclone. I believe is has some option to ignore errors. Can't remember the exact option. I've used it before to backup data from a hard drive with bad sectors.

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Get RIP Linux and use ddrescue.............I use it daily to recover data from bad HDD's.

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