OSFClone or Ubuntu

[West Swan]

Hi,

I have an old XP laptop with damaged sectors. It no longer boots into Windows.

I intended to use a Ubuntu live CD to cut and paste the files to an external drive. But I'm not sure how Ubuntu handles damaged sectors and don't want to further damage the drive.

However, a friend told me about OSFClone and suggested I use this to create a raw image file of the laptop onto the external drive and then once done, plug the external drive into my desktop computer and finally use OSFMount to recover the files.

I guess my question is which option is better? Can OSFClone create an image file from a drive that has damaged sectors ie will it just ignore the damaged sectors and let me copy all the good data across?

I know some imaging software will fail when it encounters damaged sectors right?

Hope you can help

Regards,

Paul

[David (PassMark)]

OSFClone reads large blocks of data at a time (for speed). When OSFClone finds a bad sector, it seeks back to the beginning of the block and attempts to read each sector individually. Good sectors are acquired and bad sectors are replaced with zeros.

So it shouldn't fail due to a small number of bad sectors. You might lose data however.