I posted earlier about my situation, but I'm looking at the issue from a different point of view now, so I thought I'd start a new thread.

It appears that I have bad blocks on my hard disk, and I want to find the best way to back everything up so I can restore it all to a new drive after I swap them. I will probably be sending in the drive under warranty, so I won't have both drives at the same time (and this is on a laptop anyway, so I wouldn't be able to image from one to the other).

At this point I've already made CD backups of vital files, but switching now would mean repartitioning, reinstalling OSs, all applications, restoring the backup, getting everything set up again, etc., where I'd rather do something closer to making an image of what I have now and restoring it to the new drive with a minimal amount of work spent doing all this.

At this point, it looks like an external USB hard drive is the best choice for backup media (let me know if people have other suggestions), so I'm planning to pick one up and backup onto that. I was looking into partimage for doing the image idea, but I read that a single bad block on the drive will make partimage stop altogether, and there's no way to make it skip the bad data and backup what is there.

Is there any way to make an image that ignores my bad blocks? If not, what is the best and most reliable way to make as close as possible to a "full backup" to this external drive?

Thanks in advance.

One you thing you can do is get an External USB Drive with and internal 2.0 drive which is what is in your notebook. Then using Ghost for Linux you can boot with the CD and copy Disk to Disk. Then if you feel mechanical incline you can remove the drive from the external case and put that in your notebook. Then send of the bad drive. When you get it back you can always do the same above or just but the replacemnt in the external case. It needs to be as big as the bad drive or better get a bigger one and then you have a bigger drive when done. Only concern is I do not know how raw data disc todisc will work if there is bad blocks. Might work fine only way to know is try. If it doesn't work you could always return the USB drive.

Brian1

Since this is all my data at stake, I'd rather not play around with something I'm not completely sure will work as I want it to. If there are questions about bad block handling with disc-to-disc copy, maybe I'd rather not do an exact image but something as close to a full backup as possible (to minimize the number of steps required to get back to my present state on the new drive). Just looking for suggestions in general so I can figure out what my options are, so thanks.