Vax! (and epilogue on teledisk)

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Wed Feb 24 14:28:32 1999

At 07:10 PM 2/24/99 +0000, you wrote:
>> You want your raw disk
>> reader to be able to recover from those types of errors, too.
>
>Is this a big problem?
>
>Unless the bad sector has to remain bad - i.e. it's used for part of a
>copy-protection scheme - then surely archiving it as _anything_ is OK.
>The OS should ignore bad sectors when you use the real disk, so if you
>write the image back to a real disk, it will ignore the arbitrary data
>you stuck in the image.

Yes, you need a read-raw utility that's smart enough to inject
null data when the sector can't be read. I think it's useful
to know that the archived disk had errors when reading, and
to record that in the file. Also, a file header can be useful
for indexing - then there's something in the file that can
represent what was scrawled on the paper label, for example.

- John
Received on Wed Feb 24 1999 - 14:28:32 GMT