Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Small suggestion regarding the tutorial (in the online doc)

[Scott Dwyer]

On 10/8/2013 3:44 PM, Iphone Recovery Online Info wrote:
> One thing you may want to do is as follows: now we need to provide 
> --force in order to allow writing to a device and not a file. In such 
> cases, you may query the model number and serial number like smartctl 
> does, and print them to the console, and ask for a last confirmation 
> from the user ("Please check the model and serial numbers on the hard 
> disks, and press Y if they are correct").
> I'm not sure how can you do that in a device-independent manner 
> though. You can find some C code to start with here:
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2432759/usb-drive-serial-number-under-linux-c 


Antonio,
IF you decide to do something like this (press Y if they are correct), I 
have a suggestion and a request.

Suggestion:
Along with the model and serial number, also list the size in human 
readable form along with actual bytes (like the first line of an "fdisk 
-l /dev/sda" command would return).

Request:
IF you do this, PLEASE include an option flag to bypass it, for those of 
us that may call ddrescue from another program.

I just did a quick test on the SCSI version from that stackoverflow 
link, and while it seemed to work at first, putting to the test with a 
USB adapter did not give the proper serial number of the actual drive. 
Unless you can work some magic, the easiest way might be to make 
external calls to programs like hdparm and smartctl (after seeing if 
they exist first) and process the output to get the model/serial number. 
You would be stuck relying on an outside program, but they would be 
likely to give proper results as they have been around awhile.

Thanks,
Scott