Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Can not killall -9 ddrescue

[Ariel]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2006 address@hidden wrote:

> However, Crtl-C, or even sudo killall -9 ddrescue do not manage to stop
> ddrescue when it faces errors such as:

> Is it a bug or is it unavoidable? I do not feel like going for a
> trial-and-error approach if I have to reboot the computer at each
> attempt :(

It's unavoidable. The kernel can't kill it because it's waiting for a 
lower level in the kernel. When it sees a read error the kernel does a few 
retries, and until it's done you can't stop it. (There is probably a patch 
to speed that up in the kernel, but I don't know of one off hand.)

It's best to Crtl-C, then wait, it will eventually stop, as long as it's 
still displaying sector errors. (It can take a while, possibly because 
it's reading an entire block, so it has to retry every sector in the block 
before it's done.)

> PS : will it finish to kill the drive if I let the process runing a
> whole day?

Depends :)

If your write head is broken, then no, since you are not writing. However 
if the surface of the disk has a scratch, or dirt got in it, then yes.

My guess is that whatever damage is going to happen already happened.
If you can skip the bad areas good, but otherwise just let it run.

Be sure to give it the -n option, then once it does a full run, you can 
run it again without -n.

        -Ariel