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Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Feature request - ddrescue


From: Antonio Diaz Diaz
Subject: Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Feature request - ddrescue
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:40:43 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.7.11) Gecko/20050905

Dave Burton wrote:
However, if you simply overwrite a failing drive with all zero
sectors (which is what the manufacturers' utilities do), the
drive might remap the bad sectors, and it might (temporarily)
appear to be a good drive.

John Gilmore uses GNU ddrescue to remap the bad sectors just as you suggest. See it here http://www.toad.com/gnu/sysadmin/index.html#ddrescue


So I wanted a disk wiper program which would zero out only the
good sectors, and leave the bad sectors alone.  That way, the
drive will still test bad (i.e., with unreadable sectors).

It seems it would be useful to make ddrescue able to overwrite good or bad sectors in the original drive or, as Christian Franke suggested here http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ddrescue/2007-06/msg00002.html, in the copy (to make bad sectors easily recognizable when examined with an hex editor).

I propose the addition of a new option to ddrescue, "--fill", with an argument telling it what sectors to fill. For example:

  ddrescue --fill=+ /dev/zero /dev/hdb logfile

would write with zeros the sectors of /dev/hdb listed as good (+) in logfile, and:

  echo 'BAD SECTOR' > tmpfile
  ddrescue --fill=- tmpfile drive_copy logfile

would fill with the string "BAD SECTOR" the sectors of drive_copy listed as bad (-) in logfile.

What do you think?


Regards,
Antonio.




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