HDDSuperClone

[maximus]

I got sidetracked yet again and went ahead and did something I said I was not going to do. It had been requested more then a few times, so I decided to look into how much work it would be. And somehow I managed to find a way that was not too difficult or time consuming (still not saying it was easy or fast). I have created a Live CD based on Lubuntu that includes all three of my tools installed on it. It is available through the website.
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddlivecd

 

[maximus]

I have released a new version 1.2 of HDDSuperClone free, with the most important additional features of enabling ATA passthrough and the skip threshold timer for the free version. That makes the free version pretty robust, and in my opinion it is much better than ddrescue.

I have also been working on the GUI, but it definitely requires much code reconstruction. And I am attempting to do this while not breaking the current command line version. It has been slow going but at least still a work in progress. All it can currently do is load a progress log file (now called opening a project).

 

[maximus]

So as I have started to work on the GUI version, I have decided to try something I never thought I would attempt. And that is multi-language support. It requires more work in the programming for me, but now is the time to implement it since the GUI is in the beginning stages. The concept is simple. All the normal (English) text for the GUI can be exported as a text file in a specific format, translated by something such as Google Translate, copied and pasted into a new language text file, and then imported (as long as the main format is not broken). This approach would allow almost any language to be supported, although it would only be as good as the translator. And while I could supply some common languages with the releases, it would not be required of me as the translation can be done by the end user. I would plan on making a simple video demonstrating how to change the language that would be placed on the website. Below is a small example of the language file format. So what do you think of this idea?

English:

_HDDViewer_0.3-alpha_20160820_
___0___
File
___1___
Quit
___2___
Open
___3___
Error!
___4___
Warning

Translated to Russian:

_HDDViewer_0.3-Alpha_20160820_
___0___
файл
___1___
Уволиться
___2___
открыто
___3___
Ошибка!
___4___
Предупреждение

 

[maximus]

:lol: :ugeek: So as I was playing around with Bing Translator, I saw the option and just had to do it. Here is the same code translated to Klingon :lol: :ugeek:

_hddviewer_0.3-alpha_20160820_
___0___
teywI'
___1___
bup
___2___
ghIt
___3___
Qagh!
___4___
warning

 

[pclab]

If you want help to translate to Portuguese, just send me the TXT file.

 

[maximus]

[post]5667[/post] If you want help to translate to Portuguese, just send me the TXT file.

When the time comes I will be more than happy to accept offers for proper translation. One issue will be that every time I release a new version it could require additional translation and any language file from previous version may not work for the new version. I am thinking that I will need to keep an archive of the original language files for each release, and also difference files that would show the actual text differences between the last version and the new version. And those files would be placed on the website, along with any translated language files supplied to me. That should make it easier for anyone to keep up with the translation.

 

[pclab]

OK, call when needed.

 

[maximus]

I finally have a report where HDDSuperClone free version very much outperformed ddrescue. The short version is that the drive appears to have one head out of four that is not reading any data at all. The user gave up trying with other cloning tools, including ddrescue, because they were taking too long with very little results, and gave HDDSuperClone a try. It recovered about 73.9% of the data in a reasonable amount of time (see the full report on the website for more info). The user also suffered a power loss during the recovery which caused a partially written progress log file, showing that the backup log file is very useful as the backup file was fully intact. The full version of this report can be viewed on the website at the following link:
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsu ... ss-stories

I know that everyone here is waiting for me to make the paid version, but until then I am still going to try to make my point that Ddrescue is no longer the king of free cloning tools. HDDSuperClone is better

 

[maximus]

I would like to ask a technical question about head movement. A user has provided a progress log file that shows that one head of four appears to be totally dead, but then there are also a couple spots where it appears that the other heads are also having issues reading. I am wondering how this can happen. Is it possible that the bad head is hitting physical damage on the platter and causing the whole head stack to fluctuate? Or is this more likely the spot where the drive may have been running when a physical impact happened causing damage to that cylinder area on all platters? How can this result be possible?

 

[pclab]

If a drive have suffered a hit, it could make one head go bad and make other heads to make a minor surface damage, but still good on other places.
So, it's very possible.