Re: [tlug] Disk geometry

[B0Ti <9915104t@example.com>]

Frank Bennett wrote:

> One of the utilities I'm looking at for use with RepliCoaster is "partimage",
> a program that makes backup archives containing the literal content of all
> sectors used by the installed filesystem.  I like the approach, because it
> offers a concise method for making a bootable image of a non-native (i.e.
> non-Linux, non-Unix) operating system.
>
> However, I was told by the member behind "B0Ti" that sector-by-sector
> partition backup is a fundamentally flawed approach:
>
>   If you use PartImage or anything else that reads the partition itself then
>   the backup/rescue will most probably fail if the user has bad sectors.
>
> During backup, because sectors are read and cataloged atomically by partimage
> (after analyzing the file system allocation bitmap), it should be able to drop
> those it can't read without losing the plot during backup.

I looked at the PI documentation a bit more. At first I thought it was fs
independent, but it's not.
Since it only copies used blocks, it should be okay with partitions that have bad
sectors. (You would have to run fsck first to mark them bad)

So your approach with partimage should work well too.



--
B0Ti.