Willard Van Dyne wrote:
I'm trying to properly clone a 4.3GB (it's old, I know) hard disk which
unfortunately has a lot of bad sectors.
I am using Helix 1.7 as an operating environment, not mounting the old
drive at all.
I used the command:
dd if=/dev/hdb of=/mnt/hda7/image.dd conv=noerror,sync
My problem is that the md5 hash of the image file is different from that
of the original HD (acquired via the command: dd if=/dev/hdb
conv=noerror,sync | md5sum > /mnt/hda7/orig_disk_md5sum.txt)
Can anyone please enlighten me as to what I'm doing wrong?
The drive has bad sectors. Why do you think the original MD5 is
meaningful? Have you tried to reproduce that MD5 by re-hashing the
original drive? Chances are that you won't be able to reliably obtain
the same MD5 hash code when you hash the original drive. The bad sectors
are unpredictably-read, and your hashing tool doesn't exclude them.
If you can get a map of the bad sectors then you could use a different
hashing tool to hash just the good sectors, and in this way come up with
a meaningful MD5 hash.
Best,
Jason Coombs
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
