Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Feature request - ddrescue

[Dave Burton]

> Josh Lange wrote:
> > The next logical step after recovering data is to attempt to wipe the
> > drive,


Antonio Diaz Diaz replied:
> Ddrescue is designed to ignore read errors, but it quits as soon as it
> finds a write error. What you want is exactly the opposite of this.
>
> Moreover, I think there exist some disk wipping programs. Perhaps
> someone could tell me if none of them is able to wipe a drive with I/O
> errors. In this case, perhaps it would be worth to modify ddrescue.


Yes, there are some disk wiping programs out there.  Most drive
manufacturers have that feature in their free diagnostic tools.
I have links to six of these diagnostic programs on my "links"
page, plus links to a couple of other disk-wiping programs:
http://www.geeksalive.com/links.html#dft

There are very good reasons to not send in a drive for warranty
replacement unless the drive has first been wiped:
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/06/one_year_ago_ha.html

However, if you simply overwrite a failing drive with all zero
sectors (which is what the manufacturers' utilities do), the
drive might remap the bad sectors, and it might (temporarily)
appear to be a good drive.  If that happens and you then send
the drive back to the manufacturer for warranty replacement,
the manufacturer might claim it is a good drive and refuse to
honor the warranty!

So I wanted a disk wiper program which would zero out only the
good sectors, and leave the bad sectors alone.  That way, the
drive will still test bad (i.e., with unreadable sectors).  So
I wrote a little Perl script which uses the ddrescue logfile to
determine where the bad sectors are, and zeros everything else.
I named it ddrwipe.pl, and it is part of my collection of about
a dozen Perl scripts for use with ddrescue, here:
http://www.burtonsys.com/download/ddr2sr.zip

Here's the "help" screen which is generated if you run
ddrwipe.pl with no parameters:


--------------( begin help screen )--------------
ddrwipe.pl  ("zero-out the GOOD sectors on a bad drive")   v.3, 13-Sep-06

Usage:
   perl ddrwipe.pl /dev/hdd drive.log script2zeroit
   ./script2zeroit

or, to generate 'dd' commands instead of 'ddrescue' commands:
   perl ddrwipe.pl -d /dev/hdd drive.log script2zeroit

or, to immediately write to the drive, instead of generating a script:
   perl ddrwipe.pl -i /dev/hdd drive.log

or, to immediately write to the drive, but skip rest of block on errors:
   perl ddrwipe.pl -iq /dev/hdd drive.log

or, for verbose output:
   perl ddrwipe.pl -v /dev/hdd drive.log script2zeroit
   ...
--------------( end help screen )--------------


Regards,
Dave