We fired up dd, and it started OK, but stopped at the same physical error location - complaining about a Hard Error. It would boot in Windows, but then it would hit one of these scratch marks and just die. We had a situation recently where a friend sent a disk to us that had hard physical errors on it. But what happens when your disk is becoming a doorstop? As long as it continues to spin, even with physical damage on the drive, dd and Mac OS X will get you out of the fire. Normally, in order to make a disk image, the disk you're copying from has to be able to spin up and talk - in other words, it's OK to make a copy if the disk is healthy. It's a great way to workaround the need for Norton Ghost. It makes a bit-by-bit copy of the drive it's copying, caring nothing about filesystem type, files, or anything else. The Unix program dd is a disk copying util that you can use at the command line in order to make a disk image.
