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DYER

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 4, 2008
369
34
London, UK
Here's one for you: How can I save broken files.

Basically I have a broken windows *shudder* hard drive (it got smashed and now has many many bad sectors) and I want to save the corrupted data. Thing is, Mac's are smart and abort copying when they sense bad files.
I need my mac to ignore this sane advice and copy it anyway.

Anyone have any idea as to how I can make my Mac copy stuff without it stopping the transfer every time it tries to copy a bad file?

Many thanks,

Chris
 

Weaselboy

Moderator
Staff member
Jan 23, 2005
34,035
15,412
California
Come on guys, surely one of you must know how to do this? :(

There is a command line utility called rsync you can access in OS X Terminal that might get this to work for you. If you Google search "rsync skip errors" you will find some tips that might get you going on an rsync command that would just skip over broken files.

Here is an overview of rsync.
 

ElectricSheep

macrumors 6502
Feb 18, 2004
498
3
Wilmington, DE
You might also look into using dd with the conv=noerror,sync options specified. This will attempt to copy files with bad sectors anyway, filling the unreadable portions with NUL characters.

Another alternative would be to install and use ddrescue, which has a few other tricks to try and recover information from bad blocks.
 

DYER

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 4, 2008
369
34
London, UK
Thank you both for your guidance! I will have a go tomorrow evening and hopefully save the data. Really appreciate you help.

Thanks,

Chris
 
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