Re: forcing copy mode to finish

[jason laughman]

Thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for.  However, even armed with 
that knowledge, it’s still not clear from the documentation that fillmode works 
that way.  The documentation for the -F argument does say that any types in the 
mapfile can be used, but if you look at the example later in the manual it says:

"1) Copy the damaged drive with ddrescue until finished. Don't use sparse 
writes. This yields a mapfile containing only finished ('+') and bad-sector 
('-') blocks.”

That might be a good candidate for clarification in the docs.

— 
jason laughman



> On Mar 28, 2021, at 13:43, Antonio Diaz Diaz <antonio@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
> jason laughman wrote:
>> I've been using ddrescue to try and recover a failing 2 TB HDD.  It's
>> been running for close to three weeks now and it's still only in pass 3
>> of copying. It's recovered all but about 32 GB, and at the rate it's
>> going I may just be willing to write that data off and/or regenerate it.
>> I'd be a lot more comfortable with that if I knew what files would be
>> affected, though.  What I would like to do is have it just finish where
>> it's at and mark everything non-tried as bad-sector, or give up a *lot*
>> quicker, and then use fill mode to try and figure out which files are
>> incomplete, as described in the documentation.  Is there a way to do
>> this?
> 
> You can use fill mode to figure out which files are incomplete without having 
> to mark anything as bad-sector and the such.
> 
> First stop ddrescue with Ctrl-C. Then fill all the non-finished areas in the 
> destination partition like this:
> 
> ddrescue --fill-mode='?*/-' <(printf "NON-RESCUED-SECTOR ") /dev/sda2 
> copy_of_mapfile
> 
> It is best to use a copy of the mapfile for the fill to avoid changing the 
> original mapfile, which would prevent ddrescue from continuing the rescue 
> where it was interrupted (in case you wish to do that).
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> Antonio.