Question

How do I ghost an ecrypted hard drive with bad sectors?

Asked by: MyLopez

I have a hard drive that is failing (possible bad sectors) and it is encrypted with CheckPoint Full Disk Encryption R71 (upgraded version of PointSec).  The tech support for CheckPoint recommends that I do a sector by sector clone of the drive and try to do the recovery process on the new drive.  We use ghost 7.5 and need to define the correct switches to do the sector by sector clone of the encrypted drive.  The CheckPoint tech support suggest to use switches -fni and -fns which I believe is incorrect for -fni disables direct IDE access and -fns disables direct ASPI/SCSI access.  I am guessing the corect switches may be -ir -auto -fro.  I suspect a combination of these switches may apply  -crcignore -ia -id.  Any help to clarify this would be much appreciated.

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Asked On
2009-10-08 at 11:48:22ID24797106
Tags

Ghost

,

CheckPoint

,

PointSec

Topics

DriveCopy

,

Ghostscript PDF Software

,

Norton Ghost Backup Software

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: dlethePosted on 2009-10-08 at 12:06:07ID: 25528943

THis is a good question for checkpoint.   The problem is whether or not their encryption will blow up if sectors change from whatever they had before to all zeros.  ... This is because when you take a binary image of a disk with unreadable blocks, then the software is going to either abort the copy, or fill the bad blocks with zeros.

The problem is NOT ghost, you can do a binary copy via booting a DOS-based program on a floppy if you wish ... The issue is whether or not the data can be decrypted properly, so this is a moot point until checkpoint tells you whether or not their software will fail to decrypt a disk if random blocks get changed from whatever they had before to zeros.

I suggest you contact them with this scenario and post the results, then you can get 50 % of the points ;)

 

by: MyLopezPosted on 2009-10-08 at 15:48:59ID: 25531040

The tech support mentioned they do a sector by sector copy using Acronis and we use Ghost.  I would assume Ghost can do everything Acronis can do and than some.  I am not sure how to do a binary copy but you mentioned booting a DOS-based program on a floppy.  Well, I create a bootable floppy using XP by checking the box to create an MS-DOS startup disk when formatting a floppy, than I copy the ghost executable,  the env file (license file), mouse.com, and mouse.ini and boot from the floppy and type in ghost -auto and any other swithces to clone a drive.  (You can edit the ghost.ini to preset settings).  So my ghost 7.5 is running in DOS.  why would ghost have all these different switches
(-crcignore -fro) if the software (Ghost) is just going to abort the copy due to bad blocks/ sectors?  I have other tool ffrom CheckPoint to decrypt and etc..  so I am not worried about that part.  It's just when you encrypt the drive it is more sensitive to bad sectors/blocks.  Windows will let you boot a hard drive with bad sectors but when you encrypt the drive and it gets a bad sector it will not continue to let the drive get worse in Windows or at least that is my thoughts on the software.  Thanks for the advice but I need a ghost expert.

 

by: dlethePosted on 2009-10-08 at 15:55:47ID: 25531082

So they do a bit-level clone, and did it right by making each sector an independent encrypted entity.  So no problems whether you use ghost, acronis, or anything else.

There are a lot of free programs out there that boot to dos (or LINUX, on a CD) that have a way to clone a disk. Just google "clone disk software".  Too many out there to even mention. Ghost will give you a read error when it encounters the bad block, and it *should* give you an option to select continue/ignore, or abort.

 

by: MyLopezPosted on 2009-10-08 at 15:59:33ID: 25531106

All I am asking for is what is the correct switches to use.  That is it.

 

by: MyLopezPosted on 2009-10-08 at 15:59:49ID: 25531109

For Ghost 7.5

 

by: igor-1965Posted on 2009-10-09 at 02:27:12ID: 25533346

I have looked at the manual for Ghost 7.5 and in your situation I personally would tried this exact command: ghost -crcignore -fro -ir

-crcignore   It ignores CRC errors that might indicate data corruption.
-fro   It forces Ghost to continue cloning even if the source disk contains bad clusters.
-ir   Image raw. Copies entire disk, ignoring the partition table.

Hope it answers your question.

 

by: MyLopezPosted on 2009-10-09 at 10:07:10ID: 25536769

Thanks for the reply.  

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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