On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 21:42:55 -0000, "Gareth Magennis"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

Is cloning the new drive from the working (noisy) one a viable proposition?

I would think that would be the way to go.

One thing to watch out for is bad sectors. If your "working" drive has
any bads, then you need imaging/cloning software that knows how to
work around bad patches in the media.

ddrescue and dd_rescue are two Linux based utilities that can clone a
drive in multiple passes. They image the easy sectors on the first
pass, and attempt the more difficult ones on subsequent passes. They
can also image a drive in reverse. Reverse imaging effectively
disables look ahead caching.

ddrescue: http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html
dd_rescue: http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

HDClone is a Windows based imager:
http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

Copyr.dma is a DOS based imager that can be used for smaller drives:
http://www.copyr.pl/pliki/copyrE13.zip

- Franc Zabkar
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