My disk drive might be a little shaky, will it be okay to image disks?

If you are concerned about how healthy your disk drive is for imaging software for preservation, you are right to be. Everything needs to be as accurate as possible.

When we give you the imaging tool, one of the things it does is some system and drive tests. If the drive is slightly out, which is rather common, the small variations can be compensated for. However, if your drive is more than slightly out of the acceptable range then we cannot use it to image media as we would start entering the realm of uncertainty over the integrity of the data. We would not want you to waste your time making broken disk images.