[Grateful]

A while back, I came across a situation where UBCD4Win saved my cookies again. This time, my system drive was on the fritz. My computer was developing ever more errors in chkdsk, and finally was taking 25+ min to boot up. I booted onto my CD, and used HDTune to find out that my system drive had significant S.M.A.R.T. errors; and searching online using FireFox, I found out that I could expect things to get worse relatively quickly.

My situation then was this: I had made a backup of my personal documents months ago, and not many had significant changes since then. That being said, I wanted to keep the changes I did have. Before replacing my system disk, I wanted to copy the files I had to a folder on a good disk. Every time I tried to do it, the buggy disk would intermittently generate an error. A further attempt to copy would at first zip through the files that were still in memory cache, but copying a folder with many subfolders and large files soon broke that scheme too. I needed something that would either retry a copy, or copy the files that were not yet copied to a good drive, and ignore the others. I found FreeFileSync at SourceForge. It does those things, and can also refresh only newer files. I was able to get it to keep trying, until I'd gotten all my necessary files backed up.

I figure this is a not entirely uncommon situation: a HD is failing S.M.A.R.T. tests, and somebody is having trouble getting files off of it before it is totally kaput. FreeFileSync does this admirably. Also: 1) It is small. The necessary files, when uncompressed, are only 1.54 MB. 2) It is free. It has a GPL license. These things made me think it would be an excellent addition to the UBCD4Win. So there you go. I am not too inclined to follow this up much, as my problem is solved, and others can find it and download it like I did. Still, a fairly common reason for using the UBCD4Win is that a drive is failing; and in such a case, the files might need something better than windows, which gives up upon the first problem it encounters in copying a folder. Do with this idea what you will, and debate it among yourselves, but my contribution here is observing that I think this would be a really great candidate for inclusion.

Cheers,
JohnC

[rdsok]

You may want to look at Unstoppable Copier that is already included with the project and is also good for the situations like you mentioned.

[masterchi]

Also testdisk is a fabulous tool already included in UBCD4WIN that has never failed me on a failing hard drive.