2. For the first time, I used ddrescue 1.17 with Xubuntu 14.04 - direct mode
worked fine, bad sector sizes were aligned by 512bytes. Then I used versions up
to 1.20 - worked fine, too.
Now I am using ddrescue 1.22-pre3 (latest) with Lubuntu 16.04 LTS - and BAD-sectored
areas are aligned by 4096bytes!!! Though, Victoria for Windows in PIO-mode sees only 3
BAD sectors in one of the 8-sectored blocks. I wiped them 3 (had rewritten), then
ddrescue successfully read that block!!! The second block contained 8 BAD sectors
(Victoria could not read them, so I wiped them all =8 ). All that were "soft
BADs", some touched the system area slightly. Later, after having made the full-copy
of that disk with ddrescue, the source disk was rewritten with DMDE (input and output
were the same source disk) and fixed with chkdsk. The only valuable thing damaged - was a
DOC-file (about 768 characters). Disk is usable again.
So, I think, the newest Linux kernels (v.4 and above) do not work correctly
with direct mode, and even do not read physically blocks by 512bytes :(. Does
anyone know anything about such a kind of problem? Is it caused by the kernel,
or by ddrescue? I'll try older versions of both kernel and ddrescue soon, and
report the results to help the development of ddrescue.