Re: [Bug-ddrescue] bug/feature request: sparse file to block device

[Steven Noonan]

Sorry, I was unclear. "empty" meant "read-as-zero".

ddpt seems to have worked for what I needed, though.

- Steven

On Wed, Oct 31, 2012 at 4:50 PM, Antonio Diaz Diaz <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello Steven,

Sorry for the very late answer, but I lost track of your message.

Steven Noonan wrote:

It seems that ddrescue doesn't like using -S with block device output
targets. My use case is copying a sparse file (QEMU raw disk image)
onto an empty physical volume. I'd like to avoid doing 'dd
if=sparsefile of=/dev/sdf' because zeros from the sparse file will be
written to the target.

Unless by 'empty' you mean 'filled with zeros' the resulting copy would be incorrect and it would be impossible to fix it (short of repeating the copy).

But given that writing directly to devices is not a task for beginners, I may change ddrescue to allow such 'sparse' writes (documenting it clearly, of course).


Best regards,
Antonio.