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A possible way to save a corrupted drive or partition
Authored by: woodgie on Dec 02, '05 09:31:54AM

Just a (possible) reason this works from experience and discussion with other knowledgeable people. I'm sure I'm not entirely right and I have no doubt I'll be unceremoniously put right in short order.

When you make a Disk Image from a disk (as opposed to a folder full of files) Disk Utility makes it using Block Copies, that is it copies 1s and 0s directly from the drive in (off the top of my head) 512 byte chunks. This bypasses (most of) the need to read a possibly damaged/corrupt file catalogue that prevents file level reads and writes. Therefore if the disk catalogue is damaged and the OS can't mount the drive, you can still make a block copy of the drive (mostly).

There's one caveat. You may find, as I have, that while you made the Disk Image without a problem, as you may have Block Copied a corrupt/damaged disk catalogue you might find you have troubles mounting/reading the Disk Image. (I'm sure it's more complex than that though.)

Now, that was very oversimplified. I await those more knowledgeable to pick it to pieces :)



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