Handy trick: How to force Ghost to clone a drive with bad sectors
Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2003 11:39 pm
Doesn't happen too often nowadays since drives usually fail catastrophically without any warning, but I had a client's drive go bad. It could still sometimes boot XP, but it was loaded with bad sectors, and even if I ran a thorough scan with Norton Disk Doctor and let it relocate bad clusters, I still couldn't clone the drive without getting sector errors.
Then I remembered that Ghost has a command line switch to force a clone ignoring sector errors: the "-fro" switch as in:
ghost.exe -fro
You can also enable this feature from Ghost's options menu. I think it's in the Misc tab.
You don't want this switch on by default, but it's handy if your source drive has bad sectors.
So I copied the drive, but I knew I had some corrupt system files (text was missing from some Windows menus for instance). But I took a chance that the restore files were intact and rolled the system back to a restore point from a few weeks ago, and everything is working just fine.
Then I remembered that Ghost has a command line switch to force a clone ignoring sector errors: the "-fro" switch as in:
ghost.exe -fro
You can also enable this feature from Ghost's options menu. I think it's in the Misc tab.
You don't want this switch on by default, but it's handy if your source drive has bad sectors.
So I copied the drive, but I knew I had some corrupt system files (text was missing from some Windows menus for instance). But I took a chance that the restore files were intact and rolled the system back to a restore point from a few weeks ago, and everything is working just fine.