HDD GURU FORUMS

Anyone know of a software that can take two partial images and mix them together into a full one? Basically I have a drive that I get slightly different info off of every time I run it through dd_rescue. It fills in the spots it can't read with zeroes. If some software was intelligent to look at multiple images and make a new one using all of the non-zero data from the input files that would be great.

I've poked around in winhex etc and can't seem to find a function like this. Anyone know of anything?

I usually build a complete image of zeros then paste the partial
images into the proper location.

The issue in this case being that the partials that I have have empty spots distributed all over them, rather than just chunks. Basically I have:

GOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODxxxxGOODGOODGOODGOODGOOD
GOODGOODxxxxGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOOD
GOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODxxxxGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODxxxxGOOD

and

GOODxxxxGOODGOODGOODxxxxGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOOD
GOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODxxxxGOODxxxxGOODGOODGOODGOODxxxxGOODGOOD
GOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODGOODxxxxGOODGOODGOODGOODGOOD

and want to reassemble them into one solid good image.

one thing you might try is reverse imaging the drive.( this will
eliminate cached reads and read-ahead)

I use media-tools for this, and I used Runtime's Disk explorer
for individual sectors.
This is sometimes a time consuming process.
if you find something automatic please let us know

my usual weapon of choice is dd_rescue/dd_rhelp/ddrescue. usually this is sufficient but I was working with a particularly bad drive this week that was successful imaging in different spots depending on what software I was using.

I would use winhex.

drccsc wrote:my usual weapon of choice is dd_rescue/dd_rhelp/ddrescue. usually this is sufficient but I was working with a particularly bad drive this week that was successful imaging in different spots depending on what software I was using.

dd_rescue is all what you need.
In the default, it writes only if can read.
The -A option forces to write if the source is unreadable!

Anyway, if you have a little knowledge for programming, with linux and dd_rescue it is easy to write the solution!

Additionally, try to heat up, or cool down a little the drive....

Regards,
Janos