Re: Hello ddrescue team

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hola Ricardo.

Ricardo Ortega wrote:
> Congratulations for your job

Thanks.


> I suggest you to add some sort of sectormap to ddrescue to identify if a
> block is zeros (null or binary zeros)

Ddrescue is already able to detect blocks of zeros (for --sparse), but I do 
not understand what exactly do you mean with "sectormap". Adding a new field 
to each line of the mapfile cannot work because each line may comprise a 
large number of sectors with different signatures. OTOH, a log file with an 
identifier for each finished sector would be huge.


> I would suggest a plugin to analyze the sector / block contents (in sector
> chunks) to identify in a single pass or in a single map the actual contents
> of the cloned regions (zero, mbr, boot sector, start of pdf, etc. I can
> handle all this. I have a large collection of signatures, so, the task is
> suited for me. But the mapfile.cc file and the rescuebook.cc file exceeds my
> C++ expertise and I do not want mess with these files

Classifying the type of sector given a list of signatures is trivial, so no 
plugin needed. The real problem is where to store, or how to communicate 
such large amount of information to the program that will process it (show 
it to the user or something).


> The objective is to determine as easy as ddrescueview the actual general
> contents of the cloned regions (zeros, start of partition, start of pdf,
> start of any magic the user wants) in a C header, in an ini or .signature
> file or else you may decide

Ddrescueview can provide an overview of the types of sectors because the 
mapfile is kept as small as possible, same kind of sectors are coalesced, 
and the amount of possible statuses is small (allowing different colors for 
each one). I don't see how this could be scaled to individual sectors and a 
large diversity of sector types.


Best regards,
Antonio.