My backup strategy for the past 12-15 months has been to make regular clones of my system drive using Ghost 2003 to clone to 1 of 2 replaceable drives. Earlier this week, this cloning operation failed, with Ghost reporting errors reading some sectors.

I have purchased DiskPatch 2.0 / Tech, to try to overcome this problem, but although Ghost 2003 continues to fail with read errors at the same sectors, Disk Patch Surface Scanning successfully reads these sectors. I have set 'Read Retries' = 0, and re-read the faulty sectors several times, but without success. Is there any way in which I can force these sectors to be re-allocated, or is there a method by which I can force DiskPatch to continually Read/Write the faulty sectors until a read error is reported?

Product you are using: DiskPatch 2.0 / Tech

Operating system / Service Pack: XP SP2

Size of subject harddisk: 80GB

DiskPatch can perform a read/write scan that should reallocate bad sectors if the read gives problems. If the read doesn't give problems, no reallocation is done. If you let DiskPatch perform a read/write scan and nothing is reallocated, nothing is wrong according to DiskPatch and we can't do much more. It might be helpful to see what you can do with reread options in Ghost, or try a different clone tool (or different disk surface scan tool) to see what comes up. HDWorkbench (demo) can also scan the disk surface, you could give the demo a try.

Regards,
Tom

Thanks for reply, although your suggestions could become rather expensive, with still no guarantee of success!

Diskpatch did see one of the faulty sectors, but on that occasion I had Read Retries set to 32. Hence my last question: if I could persuade Diskpatch to repeatedly RW the affected sector, with retries set to 0, this might be a method of flagging the sector as bad. It is difficult to imagine that Ghost 2003 is more 'sensitive' to Read Errors than DiskPatch, and there doesn't appear to be any means of changing the read retries within Ghost.

Product you are using: DiskPatch 2.0 / Tech

Operating system / Service Pack: XP SP2

Size of subject harddisk: 80GB

>>>if I could persuade Diskpatch to repeatedly RW the affected sector, with retries set to 0, this might be a method of flagging the sector as bad.<<<

Correct.

>>>It is difficult to imagine that Ghost 2003 is more 'sensitive' to Read Errors than DiskPatch<<<

Not really. A ghost image can't be trusted once a single sector appears bad. DiskPatch doesn't look at a disk in that way, so a bad disk read that turns out okay after a few tries is fine by DiskPatch, but not for Ghost. If i remember correctly though Ghost has some switches that affect error read behavior. You should check the ghost /? screen or contact Ghost support for more info on this.

Regards,
Tom