[G4] Backing up hard drive

[Harry Freeman]

Greetings ( + )!( + )

Rich, just because Tech Tool Pro 4 has reported 869 bad blocks on the 
WD400BB doesn't mean that the disk needs to be removed from service.

What happens when a disk has bad blocks is that the control electronics 
will mark those blocks, not to be used. So that when data is written to 
the disk the bad disk are skipped during the write operation.

 From my history I can tell you a story about a Disk Drive that we were 
using from Control Data Corporation, that we were using for the logging 
of telephone call records. Our processing center keep complaining about 
bad data, so after conferring with Control Data Corporation it was 
discovered that when the disk was formatted that the "Bad Block Data" 
was being discarded instead of being written back onto the disk. Also 
when the disk maintenance operation was preformed the bad block data 
was discarded.

So Control Data Corporation corrected one of their sub-routines which 
then wrote the "Bad Block Data" back to the disk and all of our bad 
data went away.

So unless your sister is experiencing corrupted data I would advise her 
not to worry to much about the disk drive. However it's sill a good 
practice to back-up your disks whenever possible.
----------------------------------------------------

On Nov 5, 2006, at 6:15 AM, Richard Klein wrote:

> I'm trying to help my sister (long-distance) replace the hard drive in 
> her Gigabit Ethernet.
>
> Tech Tool Pro 4 reported 869 bad blocks in a surface scan of her 
> Western Digital WD400BB 40GB hard drive.  She has an external USB 
> drive that's at least 40GB, so I'll have her format that, back 
> everything up onto it, and then take it out of the external case and 
> use it to replace the Western Digital drive.
>
> How can she back it up so that, after putting the replacement drive 
> into the Mac she can just boot directly from it?
>
> Thanks!
> -- 
> Rich
> _______________________________________________


Cheers, /\*_*/\

Harry (*^_^*)
* If pro is the opposite of con, then what is the opposite of progress? 
Congress!
Men's restroom House of Representatives,
Washington, DC