Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Feature Request: Append some information about sectors

[William]

Hello Antonio.


I'm a data recovery professional and I think ddrescue the best software 
to extract data from damaged hard drives.

Such informations about sectors are very important and would be great 
improvements, especially at the retry pass (-r), when important 
informations (ipos etc) may remain unchanged for a long time.

Knowing the "last (un)readable sector" is not enough to know the size of 
the current area (good or bad), but when comparing these 
readable/unreadable sectors we can deduce such good or bad areas. These 
information would be also pretty helpful at detection of hard drives 
errors and faults. As we know, each hard drive head is responsible for a 
particular disk area. We could quickly detect (wich) head problems (at 
real time) comparing the last readable sector with the last unreadable 
sector, as just one example.
Furthermore, those information can help us to improve clone operations, 
as setting good "start positions" (and other choices), especially when 
dealing with a quite damaged hd.

As a long time Ddrescue user, I'm sure that these changes will bring 
many benefits to such a great program.


Excuse my poor english.


Thank you very much.


William.


Em 22-02-2013 17:08, Antonio Diaz Diaz escreveu:
> Hello William.
>
> William wrote:
> > Feature Request:
> > Include information about "current sector", "last readable sector" and
> > "last unreadable sector" when using "-vvvv" option, being viewed at real
> > time.
>
> I am not sure if those would be useful, specially "current sector", 
> which can be inferred from ipos (or opos).
>
>
> > In most cases, such information could not be read due to the rate of
> > sectors changing, but I think It would help in diagnosis of damaged hard
> > drives. Per example, a damaged head usually generates big unreadable 
> > areas.
> > On the other hand, damaged platters commonly generates many unreadable
> > small areas.
>
> But ddrescue skips and jumps. Knowing the "last readable sector" is 
> not enough to know the size of the current area (good or bad). You 
> need to look at the logfile for that.
>
>
> > It would also be useful to show the activity of ddrescue when
> > running retries in slow areas.
>
> There is no such thing as "retries in slow areas". Slow areas are 
> "good areas" (they have been successfully read) and are therefore not 
> retried.
>
>
> Regards,
> Antonio.