[jkgraham]

I want to create a image of my hard drive to an external USB hard drive. I have Power Quest Drive Image 2002. It fails and gives me a read error #50. I think I may have a bad sector. Will Norton Ghost make an image of my hard drive even if it has a bad sector?

At one time my Device Manager said I had a bad sector. But when I installed Drive Image 2002 it said that the address to the sector was corrupt and that it would fix it (or something like that - I can't remeber). Now Scandisk, Chkdsk and Device Manager all tell me my hard drive is ok with no bad sectors.

The read error may also be some of the Virus Protection software that I have which includes Symantec AntiVirus. But I have tried to disable all of that software in Control Panel-Services and the Drive Image Software re-boots anyway underis on boot software on my hard drive (but not from a disck).

If i boot from the CD I can't get access to the external USB hard drive where I want to save the image.

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If you feel like trying something else that might work, I use DriveImage XML. May work, may not but its free.

[statictech]

If you feel like trying something else that might work, I use DriveImage XML. May work, may not but its free.

[Neil Jones]

Norton Ghost has a command line option to force it to carry on when it finds bad sectors but a lot depends on the state of the drive. If its too badly gone nothing will read it.

Hard drives have spare sectors beyond what goes to make its capacity. What normally happens when a bad sector is found it gets marked as such and reallocated to one of the spare sectors. Therefore its possible that a drive can have multiple bad sectors but not show up as such. They only start showing up in CHKDSK logs and what not when there are no spare sectors left to reallocate to.

As to USB support in DOS - officially its not possible.
However there are universal Panasonic USB DOS drivers available and its MSCDEX equivalent, however you will need to build your own bootdisk to access your USB drive under DOS.