I Stumbled on this article and think we should all learn more about Terminal’s utilities that are part of Unix and thus free.
The Unix program dd is a disk copying util that you can use at the command line in order to make a disk image. It makes a bit-by-bit copy of the drive it’s copying, caring nothing about filesystem type, files, or anything else. It’s a great way to workaround the need for Norton Ghost.
Normally, in order to make a disk image, the disk you’re copying from has to be able to spin up and talk — in other words, it’s OK to make a copy if the disk is healthy. But what happens when your disk is becoming a doorstop? As long as it continues to spin, even with physical damage on the drive, dd and Mac OS X will get you out of the fire.
I am not going to reproduce the article here. But the author says that as long as the disk will spin this command can work:
dd bs=512 if=/dev/rXX# of=/some_dir/foo.dmg conv=noerror,sync
His last line is “Once again, that which destroys a Windows box becomes a play thing to a Mac OS X box.”
See the article here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050302225659382
