[Info-vax] Backup A Dying Disk.

[wa2flq]

I have RD54 disk that that whose entropy is rising. Someone who doesn't have a backup asked me to save what I can before it dies completely.  I realize its probably a goner, but I want to give it a shot.

I can mount the drive read only with error logging turned off, but trying to do a backup is painfully slow.  Between the high number of defects and read retries, it is taking forever.   Is there a way to turn down or suppress the number of retries so I can grab the readable content?  Or is there another utility that can be used to grab an image (good and bad bits) from the drive ?  Its a MicroVAX II running VMS 5.5-2 (booted on a good drive).

Thanks in advance.