Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Suggestion / feature request - bad head mapping

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hi Peter,

Peter Clifton wrote:
> I was curious as to whether you had suggestion how (or interest in
> adding a feature), to have ddrescue focus on the 3/4 of the disk
> which is more readily accessible.

Yes, I plan to implement some kind of error map that ddrescue will 
calculate before starting the rescue and will adjust after each read 
error. I expect that this technique will be able to adapt well to the 
situation you describe.

But I'm about to publish the first release candidate for ddrescue-1.23 
in a week or so. Therefore this feature will have to wait until 1.24.


> Anyhow - also wanted to say thanks for the utility. An improvement
> over dd_rescue, and I'm sure it has saved many people much data.

You are welcome. :-)


> I guess a related (but very advanced) feature one could imagine
> adding at some future point, is persuading ddrescue to focus on
> sectors of the disk which are identified as containing desired
> filesystem data (as proprietary tools do). Obviously this would
> require connecting with a filesystem driver, so would be rather a
> complex task. Is this kind of functionality on your wish-list for the
> future, or out of scope for ddrescue development?

It is out of scope for ddrescue development, but as others have pointed 
out in this thread, there are tools that can create domain mapfiles for 
ddrescue. (I plan to document them in the ddrescue manual). The strength 
of free software is the collaboration among projects.


Best regards,
Antonio.