On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 16:17:06 -0700, Brad Bourn
Not to give Gibson Credit, but to take away M$'s
If Gibson's software is willing to try more than once and/or not fail out of a copy if it can't read a sector, and be able to continue on at least getting what it can, this is already a BIG improvement over what windows does/can do.
That being said, use of a real OS like GNU/Linux can get you even better results that Gibson's software.
For the laymen, there is a value. Assuming they don't know about ubcd and the like. ehehehe
There isn't anything more annoying than to try to do a backup in exploder, and have it error out somewhere in the middle and just stop, not knowing where it left off. If your forced to use that machine (for a client or something) the best you can do is xcopy /s/e/c/h/y.....
Even when I was still nieve enough to use M$ crap, pkzip did a better job than copy or xcopy (back in the DOS days) for backing up dying harddrives.
We have to backup dieing hard-drives occasionally too. I have not really been very impressed with the 2.4 kernel. (Have not tried 2.6). Believe it or not, we boot to DOS and use a commercial program called "Encase". It is pretty expensive, so I can't recommend it for most people, but if you are serious about data recovery it is worth investigating. Greg