HDDSuperClone

[maximus]

Epic failure on trying to get that drive to be seen by Linux. It isn't the log, it is failing reading sectors at the beginning of the disk. I have erased sector 0 so there is no partition table, so why the hell is Linux trying to read sector 984 :?: :!: I tried to erase it and it looked like it was going to work, but apparently it is not reallocating the sectors, just keeping them in the buffer until the next power cycle

 

[maximus]

Version 0.5-alpha is released. Dividing did not work in reverse, it would get stuck on a position so needed to be fixed. Maybe someday I will get it to a stable beta version, it has to be close :roll:

I had an email a few days ago from someone trying to use it against ddrescue with a USB adapter and said that it exited when it hit a bad spot while ddrescue only paused and then continued. I replied and one of my main questions was wondering if he could verify that ddrescue was actually reading good data after the error. I have not heard back yet. In all my testing, if hddsuperclone exits with a device error code, then the device is no longer responding. It will be interesting to see if this is the case, or if the USB adapter is giving a false error. After all, USB adapters are not all created equal and are very unpredictable.

 

[Jared]

Yeah, in my experience ddrescue doesn't even work well over USB. That's why in my tutorial I mention the need to directly SATA connect.

 

[maximus]

I did get a response back. The drive is being imaged by ddrescue now, and when finished it will be tested with hddsupertool. And I have been so focused on getting the core imaging process working properly, I almost forgot about adding the domain file ability, which I was kindly reminded of. And I learned something new: I did not know that partclone could produce a ddrescue style domain file for imaging the used portion of a partition. I need to play with that to see how well it works, as it could be something worth mentioning when using the free version of hddsuperclone (after implementing the domain file option of course).

 

[maximus]

So while on the subject of log and domain files, the structure of a ddrescue log file is well known and can be easily imported and exported. But what about the hardware imagers? Do they offer the ability to import something like a ddrescue log file if the drive was already partially imaged that way?

 

[pclab]

Not that I know of....

 

[HaQue]

That would be a nice feature and an obvious oversight if it didn't exist. imagine a 4TB drive imaged with ddrescue and needing only a few MB from the hardware imager.. would cut down job times enormously, and also much less work the disk has to do for more chance of fail.

 

[Jared]

It's not a bad idea, but probably not much demand. Guys with hardware imagers generally prefer to use those over ddrescue and only run it if it's a type of media they can't run on the hardware imager like a SCSI or SAS drive.

 

[maximus]

[post]4821[/post] It's not a bad idea, but probably not much demand. Guys with hardware imagers generally prefer to use those over ddrescue and only run it if it's a type of media they can't run on the hardware imager like a SCSI or SAS drive.

Agree. And there is also the liability of importing a log from a botched rescue. Because is was not made with the hardware imager, it cannot be verified to be accurate. And with ddrescue the log is in bytes and can very easily have many areas that do not align with sectors and have a split status (I deal with this by marking those areas as untried so they must be read again to get true status).

And I also am assuming that the hardware imagers use very proprietary logs that are not documented, and may even be hard to access in raw format. That would make exporting a log to them about impossible also.

 

[maximus]

Just updated it to BETA status. I still have a few improvements I want to do to it before I start working on the more advanced paid versions. But I consider the free version stable at this point, at least until someone reports a bug! Now it just needs some testing to make sure. I posted it on hddguru in the software section as I need to get people interested in using it, will likely post again in the conventional hard drive section as that section gets a lot of action.