When you image a drive with a corrupt filesystem and/or bad sectors, then you need to clone it sector by sector. Therefore you need a target drive that is as big as, or larger than, the source drive.

You also need software that knows how to deal with bad (unreadable) sectors. I don't believe Acronis True Image (aka DiscWizard) is suitable in your case.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I currently have a good 120GB drive that is unformatted and bare. Can I use this as a place to save my image file?
fzabkar, I am running WinXP, do any of the programs you suggest work with that or are they Linux programs only?

Steve, you mentioned that you use commercial tools, what would those be?

Sorry to sound like a newbie, but I am and I want to get this right the first time. My wife has not let me hear the end of it for not backing up this hdd with all of our family pictures from the last 7-8 years.

You can use your 120GB drive provided that the number of LBAs is greater than or equal to the user area on your source drive.

As for your question regarding OS platforms ...

copyr-dma-free-tool-for-making-sector-hdd-copies-udma-t5450.html

"COPYR.DMA is a free application for making copies of hard disks with bad sectors."
"The application works in DOS environment and uses DMA mode."

http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

"ddrescue is available on bootable rescue CDs such as SystemRescueCd http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Copyr.Dma free version only copies 30 gb.

If I were you I would 1) clone the drive to the spare 120GB drive you have and then 2) do a logical recovery on that clone copy. As mentioned then you're only risking the copy if anything goes wrong with the data on the cloned drive.

Cloning

Get a version of Linux up and running, something like Ubuntu is nice and easy. Install GNU ddrescue. For info on how to use it read here: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ma ... anual.html
Use the small tutorial in the document as an example. Proceed with cloning the drive to the spare drive. Make sure you get the drive naming correct as you can easily overwrite the wrong drive which you don't want to do. Once done pack the original drive away and work on the cloned drive

Logical recovery

The Hirens disc has a lot of logical recovery software on it. A very useful and easy to use program is Get Data Back. If all you want to do is get your years of family pictures back I'd think that this part is pretty straight forward with some software.

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Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.
Data Recovery Cape Town

How should my hardware setup be?

I have formatted and installed WinXP on my spare 120GB HDD. Is this the drive I should use as my boot drive and the drive to clone my damaged one to?

Should I remove WinXP and install Ubuntu, or install both OS on this drive?

Or should I have a seperate boot drive (IDE Channel 1/Disk 0), my spare 120GB HDD (IDE Channel 2/Disk 0), and my damaged drive (IDE Channel 1/Disk 1)? Or run my spare drive as a USB device?

Steve, you mentioned you use commercial programs for data recovery. What are those?

No Steve that is not right! It is Hdduplicator which has the 30gb limit. Copyr.dma has a 128 gb limit.

In fact considering the posters situation I would consider copyr.dma as the perfect choice to make a by sector image to a replacement drive.

Redwing all you have to do is mount both drives in a pc and then boot from a cd and run copyr.

I'll give you a tip..........as the current Hirens boot disk now only contains legal software (since version 11 so I am happy to recommend it) I would suggest you download it and run it. Set the pc to boot from cd and then browse the menu system to find copyr.dma and then clone your drive.

If I boot from the CD, should the good, 120 GB spare drive be completely bare (no OS) considering the bad drive is an identical (same model,same capacity) 120GB drive that contained an unknown amount of info with an OS?

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for all of the suggestions to help me out.

As a newbie, I appreciated the patience some of you showed me.

In regards to my hardware issue, after imaging it to another drive, I was able to access all of my needed files and copy them to another location. Now my wife will let me out of the doghouse.

One question though, is there any hope for my old hard drive? Could I just format and re-use it?

You could use SeaTools to zero-fill your drive, then run the long DST. This will hopefully reallocate any bad sectors.

Afterwards, examine your drive with a comprehensive SMART diagnostic tool. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

See this article for SMART info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

You could also use MHDD or HDDScan to perform a full surface scan. This will identify any "slow" sectors, ie those that require several read retries.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.