dca@toylnd.UUCP (David C. Albrecht) (05/03/88)
Help! This is driving me crazy. I'm trying to back up disk 8 of 8 in my Unix utilities development set. Unfortunately it has a bad sector. Fortunately its a relatively empty disk and its not on anything important. Unfortunately in the fashion of most incompletely thought out utilities the floppy disk copy program sucks as it exits on a bad sector instead of getting what it can informing you of the error and doing the copy. Now the disks, of course, are in cpio format so disk fixing is out of the question I suspect (and even I'm not crazy enough to let any software on the machine try to write on the disk when I can't back it up). As a last resort I can always restore all the files to a relative directory location and re-cpio them but I'd rather not. I've tried various incantations to 'dd' but obviously I didn't swing the rubber chicken around my head enough times or my eye-of-newt wasn't properly seasoned because I'd get the ol' ack! phoey! if I tried to feed it to cpio as the 8th disk. If anyone can give me the proper incantations for communicating with the spirits of dead floppy disks so as to make copies of them I would be most obliged. David Albrecht
davek@heurikon.UUCP (Dave Klann) (05/06/88)
In article <211@toylnd.UUCP> dca@toylnd.UUCP (David C. Albrecht) writes: >Help! This is driving me crazy. I'm trying to back up disk 8 of 8 in >my Unix utilities development set. Unfortunately it has a bad sector. > [ Desparate discussion of foiled reads... ] >If anyone can give me the proper incantations for communicating with the >spirits of dead floppy disks so as to make copies of them I would be >most obliged. > >David Albrecht David, There exists a pogram that MAY be ablle to help you. A while back afio was posted to comp.sources.unix. This is a PD version of cpio (I believe the acronym is Alternate File I/O) that is much more persistent than cpio. It may or may not help, but it's worth a try. If yo don't have access to a souce archive Id be happy to dig out my copy of the source and mail it to you. David Klann {ihnp4 | uwvax}!heurikon!davek
wieland@ea.ecn.purdue.edu (Jeffrey J Wieland) (05/07/88)
In article <211@toylnd.UUCP> dca@toylnd.UUCP (David C. Albrecht) writes: >Help! This is driving me crazy. I'm trying to back up disk 8 of 8 in >my Unix utilities development set. Unfortunately it has a bad sector. >... >David Albrecht Strange... My disk 8 was bad also. Since we have 4 7300's in this office, I just borrowed another disk 8. Jeff Wieland wieland@ecn.purdue.edu