Re: [Bug-ddrescue] Feature request - ddrescue

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

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.