MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: The perfect tool

> > Currently I read them out with winhex to an exact image file. It works correctly
> but
> > doesn't seem to give multiple tries to bad sectors. Apparently there is some Linux
> > "DD" method that can do a bunch of retries on sector errors that I just found out
> > about. I will give it a try some time but there's no guarantee it will work any
> > better.
>
> Maybe we can find someone who write the perfect tool for MAME.
> Thanks for the info.

using gnu ddrescue under windows:
first go to http://www.cygwin.com/install.html and download cygwin's setup.exe, run it and install the base packages/etc. (more or less hit next a bunch of times and wait a while). once done, run the setup program again, hit next a bunch of times until you get to the package manager screen, and then in the search field type 'ddrescue' and click on the 'skip' section to set it to the higher of the two available version numbers. click next and it will download and install some more stuff.
Now on the desktop there should be a cygwin or 'cygwin bash shell' link. right click that and choose 'run as administrator'.

Now comes the complicated part. you need to figure out what the X in //PhysicalDriveX is for the disk you want to image.
In windows XP: click start, run, type 'compmgmt.msc', go to the console tree, and click "Disk Management"
In windows vista/7: click start, click accessories, rightclick on command prompt and choose 'run as administrator' and at the command prompt type compmgmt.msc, and when it shows up click disk management in the dropfield at the left (under 'storage').
In either case you should be given a bunch of disks and a list below showing disk 0,1,2,3 etc depending on how many drives you have installed.
The X in //PhysicaldriveX corresponds to this 'disk' number for each disk.

anyhow, back in cygwin, type:
mkdir ~/whatever
and then type
mount -f -b //./physicaldrivex ~/whatever/
and then type
ddrescue -r 2 ~/whatever ~/diskimage.bin ~/diskimage.log

ddrescue should try pretty hard to read the contents of the disk mounted to ~/whatever into that bin file.
If it hits some sector errors, run the command again; it will retry any error areas twice again, and leave the rest of the file it read alone.

remember, the resulting bin (and log, which shows the error and good areas) files live in the c:\cygwin\home\windows_username\ directory since you'll want to copy it out later.

LN

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